Bramwell nodded once, acknowledging without conceding.
"I understand," he said, smile intact. "Maybe not now."
Ellis glanced at me again. "April?"
I stayed still. My hands were folded in my lap now, fingers curled tight enough to feel each other. My throat locked. The room felt too loud and too close.
Bramwell spoke again. "If you're hungry, though, you picked a good place. The food here is genuinely excellent. Highly recommend the shared plates."
Ellis'shoulders sagged just slightly. "Right," he muttered. "Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt."
"No harm done," Bramwell replied easily. "Take care, Ellis."
Ellis lingered for a fraction of a second longer, then turned and left. The door closed behind him with a soft, ordinary sound that somehow felt enormous. Bramwell didn't watch him go. He sat back down instead, his attention returning fully to me like nothing else in the room existed.
''He's gone,'' he said quietly.
Then he rose without a word and moved to the chair beside me. His hand rested near mine on the table and his gaze lowered to his plate. After a moment, his fingers began to tap. The rhythm continued, even and grounding, like something constant beneath everything else.
I didn't notice at first that I was listening. Then my breathing started to follow, slowly aligning itself with that small, repetitive sound. In... out. A little deeper each time.
The tension in my shoulders loosened. My thoughts stopped pushing so hard, and just like that, I found myself calm again, anchored to something simple I hadn't realized I needed.
Then, gently, he asked, ''What do you need?'' A small pause. ''Stay or leave.''
I turned toward him, the tightness in my chest loosening just enough to speak.
''Stay,'' I said softly.
He smiled, softer now. "Sure," he replied. My fingers closed around the sunstone again.
******
We ended up staying a few minutes longer than we had planned. As usual, he managed to make me laugh, his voice easy and animated as he talked about his work, turning even the smallest details into something unexpectedly interesting. I followed along, nodding, listening, even smiling at the right moments, but part of me was elsewhere. Ellis's presence still lingered in my mind, heavy and unresolved, pulling my thoughts back no matter how much I tried to stay present.
Seeing him again had stirred every insecurity I thought I had learned to quiet, and beneath the warmth of the moment, a quieter fear settled in. I found myself wondering, almost involuntarily, whether Bramwell would begin to see me the way Ellis had, through a lens shaped by doubt, misunderstanding, and everything I had once believed about myself.
When we left, the drive back was quiet for all of thirty seconds before he glanced at me and frowned thoughtfully.
"Hm," he had said. "My favorite feature appears to be missing."
I had swallowed, staring at my reflection in the glass. He had hummed, glancing dramatically at the dashboard. "Yes. Confirmed. The April Smile has vanished. I don't see it anywhere. Might need to file a report."
Despite everything, I smiled slightly.
"There," he had said, satisfied. "Brief seismic activity. The fault line is responsive."
I looked at him then and he was still looking ahead. I noticed the way his smile had softened and how he still hadn't asked about Ellis.
"You know," he had said lightly, turning onto the main road, "in geology, when something beautiful disappears from the surface, it usually means pressure's been applied."
I had gone still, listening.
"Rocks record stress," he had continued. "Heat. Compression. Tectonic nonsense. You can actually see where the structure tightened just to survive it. People assume pressure ruins things. But some minerals only become stable because of it. Carbon, for example. Entirely unremarkable. Until you apply enough force over enough time."
He had glanced at me briefly.
"Then it reorganizes."
