“Administrative oversight.” She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug. “Nice choice of words.”
“Would you prefer ’cross-jurisdictional investigative partnership’?”
“I’d prefer ’late-night diner date with a grumpy lion shifter,’ but accuracy seems important to you.”
The beast rumbled at the worddate. Hux ignored it.
“You haven’t told me about yourself.” He leaned back in the booth, letting the worn vinyl creak beneath him. “Two weeks of working side by side, and I know how you take your coffee and what face you make when you’re frustrated with a cipher, but I don’t know where you grew up. What your favorite color is. Why you move every season.”
Her smile flickered. “That’s a lot of questions.”
“We have time. The pancakes take a while.”
She was quiet for a moment. Weighing her words. Then she seemed to make a decision.
“I grew up everywhere and nowhere. Reed family tradition—we scatter. Different towns, different countries, different supernatural communities. My parents settled in Vermont when I was twelve, but by then I was already used to moving.”
“And you kept moving.”
“For ten years now.” She stared at her coffee. “I’ve been running, and I haven’t stopped long enough to figure out what I’m running from.”
He waited. She’d done the same for him in the gardens—offered space instead of pressure, silence instead of questions.
“I see death.” Her voice was barely audible over the diner’s ambient noise. “In star charts. In the patterns of constellations. When I get close to someone—when I let myself care—I see their ending. Specific dates. Specific causes. Specific faces in their final moments.”
His gut clenched.
“I saw my grandmother.” She still wasn’t looking at him. “Three months before she died. I was sixteen. I watched her chart, and I saw exactly how it would happen—the stroke, the hospital bed, the way she’d look at my mother at the end. And then I watched it happen. Exactly as I’d seen. Down to the hour.”
“Luna—”
“I told myself it was a fluke. Then I saw my college boyfriend. Car accident. I saw it six months before it happened. Tried to warn him, but how do you tell someone you know when they’re going to die? He thought I was crazy. Broke up with me. Died anyway.” She laughed, bitter. “After that, I stopped getting close. If I never stayed, I never had to watch. If I never let anyone in, I never had to see them leave.”
The pancakes arrived. Neither of them moved to eat.
“That’s why you kept pushing me away.” Hux’s voice came out rougher than he intended. “The deflection. The sarcasm. You weren’t being difficult—you were protecting yourself.”
“And you.” She finally looked up, met his gaze. “I tried to read your chart that first week. The night of Girls’ Night, after everyone went home. I wanted to see how you’d die so I’d know when to leave.”
Cold dread slid through his stomach. “And?”
“Nothing.” Her features shifted—confusion, frustration, something almost like hope. “I couldn’t see anything. Your death isn’t there. Not because you won’t die—everyone dies—but because darkness is blocking it. The same eclipse that’s consuming your potential is hiding your future from me.”
The implications took a moment to settle.
She couldn’t see his ending. Couldn’t watch him die before he died. For the first time, she’d found someone she couldn’t pre-emptively grieve.
“That’s why you stayed.” He wasn’t asking.
“That’s one reason.” Her smile was small. Fragile. “Haven Shores is the first place in a decade where I haven’t been able to see my own death either. This town, about these gardens, about—” She stopped. Started again. “My chart shows a blank space. A gap in my future centered on Haven Shores. I don’t know if that means I die here or if everything changes.”
“But you came anyway.”
“I was curious.” She picked up her fork and started cutting into her pancakes. “After a lifetime of knowing exactly how everything would end, a blank space seemed worth investigating.”
They ate in silence for a while. The food was good—better than good, actually, the kind of simple, perfect comfort food that couldn’t exist in fancy restaurants. The coffee was strong. The booth was warm. Outside, the harbor lights reflected off black water.
“I’ve spent my whole life being the capable one.” Hux heard himself speaking and couldn’t seem to stop. “The responsible Holt. The competent mayor. The man everyone calls when there’s a crisis because they know I’ll handle it.”
