Coffee spreads across the worktable in a dark pool, soaking the corner of a shipping label, and she doesn’t even look at it.
Her eyes are squeezed shut.
Her breathing has gone shallow and rapid, the kind of breathing that means the pain has crossed the threshold from discomfort into something animal and consuming.
I can feel it from here.
I don’t need to touch her.
The spasm radiates a heat signature I can read from four feet away, the muscles clenching so hard they’re pulling her spine out of alignment in real time.
This has been building for a long time, every shift compensated for, every warning ignored, and now the bill is coming due all at once.
“Maisie,” I say, my voice low, the register that carries warmth without volume.
“Don’t.” Her command comes out tight and airless. “Just give me a second.”
I give her ten.
I count them in the rhythm of her pulse, which I can feel through the floorboards, fast and thready.
She tries to straighten.
The spasm tightens.
A sound escapes her, involuntary, somewhere between a gasp and a groan, and the shame that follows it across her face is worse than the pain.
She’s embarrassed to be hurting in front of me.
She’s embarrassed to need anything at all.
Eighty years is long enough to learnpatience.
It’s also long enough to learn when patience becomes its own kind of cruelty.
I move toward her.
Slowly.
My footsteps are nearly silent because my feet are barely solid, just enough structure to carry me across the concrete floor.
I stop within arm’s reach and I don’t touch her.
I let my warmth do what it does naturally, radiating outward in a gentle ambient field, the way a sun-warmed stone gives off heat after dark.
I know she can feel it.
I see the goosebumps rise along her forearm.
“I can help,” I say. “If you’ll let me.”
Her eyes open.
They’re glassy, bright with the kind of tears that come from muscle spasms and not from sadness, though the sadness is there too, banked underneath everything else like smoldering coals.
She looks at me, and I see the calculation happening, the war between what she needs and what she’s willing to accept from something she met twenty minutes ago, something that arrived in a crate, something that isn’t human.
“You don’t even know me,” she whispers.
