I just let it exist.
“Go to sleep, Hannah,” Cruz says softly.
“I’m not tired.”
“You’ve been awake for twenty-two hours.”
“I’m a lawyer. I’ve tried cases on less.”
He laughs, quiet and warm, and pulls me closer, and I close my eyes in the gray pre-morning with his heartbeat steady under my cheek and the Atlantic doing its ancient, indifferent, beautiful work outside.
I’m asleep within four minutes.
I know because I’m counting.
Then I’m not.
10
CRUZ
I watch her sleep for exactly as long as it takes to confirm she’s actually out.
Four minutes. She counted, I could tell. That particular focused stillness of someone applying discipline to rest. Then something released in her and she was gone, completely, with the totality of a person who has been running on will for a very long time and finally put it down.
I don’t sleep.
I lie in the gray pre-dawn with Hannah’s hand flat against my chest and her breathing gone slow and even and I look at the ceiling and have the conversation with myself I’ve been avoiding for three days.
I have to tell her.
Not because I owe her. We’ve only known each other less than a week, the concept of owing doesn’t apply here. But because she’s lying with her ear over my heart and she deserves to know what she’s listening to. Because in five days this ends or it doesn’t end, it becomes something else, something that extends past the Outer Banks into real geography and real life, and I cannot let it do that with this between us.
She told me about the years alone. About being forty and terrified and choosing anyway.
The least I can do is choose the same way.
She wakes up at eight the way she does everything, completely, immediately, no groggy transition. One moment asleep, next moment present, eyes open and clear.
“You didn’t sleep,” she says. Not a question.
“I slept a little.”
She looks at me with the lawyer eyes. “Cruz.”
“Later,” I say. “Coffee first.”
She accepts this with the specific grace of someone who knows how to read a room and understands thatlatermeansI will actually tell you, just not this secondrather thanI am deflecting indefinitely.This is one of approximately ten thousand things I’ve noticed about her that I’m keeping.
We make coffee. We take it to the deck. The morning does its obscenely gorgeous gold thing over the water and Hannah sits in her chair with both hands wrapped around her mug and her hair loose and her feet tucked up and she looks… content. Simply, quietly content, in a way I don’t think she lets herself look when she’s aware of being observed.
I observe it anyway. I’m keeping that too.
I tell her at nine-seventeen.
No preamble, no architecture around it. I’ve learned that Hannah respects directness and I’m going to give her that, even when the direct thing is hard to say.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
