Caleb appeared in the kitchen doorway. Leaned against the frame, dish towel over one shoulder, and said, pleasantly, “We do.”
I looked at him. Caleb was smiling—the kind of smile that lived in his eyes first and reached his mouth second, warm and certain and entirely without performance.
I looked back at my notes.
The warmth did something inconvenient in my chest, spreading outward from somewhere behind my sternum, and I didn’t say anything about it because saying things made them real, and real meant I had to do something about them.
Caleb came back from the kitchen. Leaned down. Pressed a kiss to the side of my jaw, easy and warm, like punctuation. Like:you’re not doing this alone.
His lips were soft. His stubble rough. The contact lasted approximately two seconds and contained more certainty than most things that took longer.
I turned my head. Caught his mouth properly. Brief. Deliberate. My hand found his hip through his flannel, fingers curling into the warm muscle there, and Caleb smiled against my lips before pulling back. His eyes were warm. Hazel, catching the morning light.
Mitch watched this from across the table with the expression of a man experiencing genuine suffering. “I’m right here.”
“I’m aware,” I said.
“I was also right about the traitor.”
“You were.”
Mitch waited. I said nothing else. The wood stove ticked. Caleb moved back to the kitchen, humming something low.
“That’s it?” Mitch said. “You were?”
“Would you like it in writing?”
Mitch’s grin went wide and slow. The kind of grin that said he’d been waiting for this moment and had prepared absolutely nothing for it because he hadn’t expected it to arrive. “Yeah, actually.”
I looked at him for a long beat. His eyes held mine, steady and warm and completely, devastatingly present. I reached over. Tore a corner off the nearest paper. Wrote three words in my clean, block print:Mitch was right.
Slid it across the table.
Mitch picked it up. Stared at it. His expression did the thing it did when something actually got through—the warm and slightly undone look he kept just under the humor, the man underneaththe performance deciding he was needed. His thumb traced the edge of the paper. Once. Carefully.
“I’m keeping this,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
He folded it. Put it in his shirt pocket. The gesture was deliberate. Reverent, almost, which from Mitch Pruitt was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing poetry.
Caleb’s voice came from the kitchen. “I want one too.”
“You didn’t have a theory,” I said.
“I had a feeling.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It led to the same place.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tore off another corner of paper. Wrote:Caleb’s feeling was correct. Slid it toward the kitchen without looking up.
Caleb hummed. The sound was pleased. Warm. I heard the paper fold.
I uncapped my pen. The short list finally went down on paper—names I’d been carrying in my head for seventy-two hours, names that belonged to men I’d trusted, men I’d worked with, men who had stood where these men stood and had chosen something else. The ink was black. The paper took it without complaint.
Mitch watched from across the table, his gaze deliberate and grounding and exactly what I needed. His eyes were steady. Unhurried. The warmth of a man who had decided that sitting here, watching me work, was exactly where he wanted to be.
