I glance at him. “Our?”
He doesn’t look up. “Yes.”
I don’t know why that one syllable catches so hard in my chest. Maybe because so much of the last year has been institutions deciding where bodies go and who gets to stay and who has to carry what alone.
Maybe because I’m tired.
Maybe because it matters.
I say, carefully casual, “And if things get ugly.”
He lifts his eyes to mine then, and there’s nothing casual in his expression at all.
“If hostility escalates,” he says, very clearly, “we leave together immediately.”
The room seems to pause around that.
The vent hums. The city glows. The rainwater is still drying in faint tracks on the outer pane.
I swallow. “Immediately.”
“Yes.”
“No arguing? No heroic lingering? No ‘just one more statement for the record’?”
His mouth shifts at the edges. “No.”
“Wow. Love that for us.”
“Selene.”
The way he says my name strips the dry humor right off me.
I set the briefing tablet down and look at him fully. He is close enough now that I can see the slight weariness under his eyes, the fresh line of a day’s labor still held in the set of hisshoulders, the calm that isn’t really calm so much as discipline shaped into something gentler.
“I mean it,” he says. “If the crowd turns, if the barriers fail, if the memorial becomes performance instead of witness, we leave. There is no world in which I stay to let them make a spectacle of you.”
A stupid response rises first—something deflecting and light, because apparently my instincts are still garbage under stress.
I kill it before it reaches my mouth.
Instead I nod once. “Okay.”
He studies my face as if checking whether I’m agreeing honestly or strategically. Eventually he seems satisfied.
I pick up the tablet again, stare at the route map, then close it entirely.
The screen goes dark.
The room exhales.
And with the briefing gone, with the speech pared back and the feeds silenced and tomorrow waiting like a pressure front just beyond the windows, I become aware of something I have been walking around for weeks.
Something that has been in the room with us longer than any of these documents.
I keep my hand on the dark tablet and say, “I need to tell you something before we go.”
He stills—not tense, exactly, but attentive in that immediate, total way of his. Like the rest of the apartment just ceased to exist as relevant terrain.
