“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine. That face isn’t not-fine, it’s pissed.” He holds out one of the drinks. “A new cider. From Tristan’s, not the bar.”
I take it because my hands need something to do. “I don’t need—”
“Nobody said you needed it.” He falls into step beside me, matching my pace, and we are walking with no particular destination in the way that Jack seems comfortable with and that I am using because moving is better than standing. “What did he do?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“I know you could handle it. I’m asking what he did.”
I drink the cider. It’s warm, and the familiarity of it is nice. I push that down. “He followed me to the river path and asked me what I’m running from.”
Jack is quiet for a moment. “He’s not wrong that you’re running from something,” he says, carefully.
“That’s not the—” I stop. Restart. “He grabbed my wrist.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.” The speed of my answer surprises me. “He didn’t. He just grabbed me. Like he’d decided I was going to leave and he was intent on stopping me.”
“Sounds like Archer.”
“Is that your defense of him?”
“It’s not a defense. It’s a description.” He looks sideways at me. “He’s not subtle. The way he cares is physical. He gets between things. It’s not always the right call and he knows it and he does it anyway because thealternative, for him, is not doing anything, and that’s worse.”
I process this.
“I told him to let go,” I say.
“Did he?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Jack nods, once. “Good. That’s… yes. Good.” He pauses. “Are you actually okay?”
“I said I was—”
“Lola.” He stops walking, and because I’m pacing with him I stop too. He pivots to face me with the version of his expression that isn’t the playful surface but the real thing underneath. “Are you actually okay?”
The question lands differently the third time, or maybe it’s the way he’s asking it. Directly, without the elaborate machinery of care that sometimes makes receiving care feel like a transaction. He’s just asking. Looking at me and asking and waiting with patience.
“Yes,” I say. And then, because it’s true and because he’s looking at me like he’ll know if I’m lying: “I’m shaken. Not… not badly. Just a bit.”
“He’s good at finding the edge of things.”
“He found something.” I look at my cider. “He’s not wrong.”
Jack doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t fill the space with reassurance or pivot to a distraction or make the acknowledgment smaller than it is. He just stands there, in the noise of the late-night carnival, and exists next to me in a way that is the most useful thinganyone has done for me in several days.
“He won’t tell the others what he thinks he knows,” Jack says eventually. “Not without more. That’s not how Archer works. He doesn’t raise alarms without evidence, he just keeps watching until the picture fills in.”
“I know,” I reply. And I do know this, somehow, already. Maybe it’s the partial bond. “That’s its own kind of pressure.”
“Yeah,” Jack agrees. “It is.”
We stand there for another minute. The stage band is finishing a set, the crowd applauding in that loose end-of-night way. The Ferris wheel is doing its slow last rotations with the cars mostly empty. The lights are reflecting in the river below the pier.
