"Protein bars don't expire that fast unless you bought them in 2019."
"2020."
"That's worse."
The banter settles between us easy and unhurried, affection delivered through insult because both of us come from worlds where direct emotion is a language we learned late. Griff's irreverence meeting my deadpan, honesty delivered sideways.
"She's in there right now," he says, nodding toward the house, "and you're out here looking at the water like a man who can't quite believe someone moved into his empty life and made it better."
"She brought flowers."
"Flowers."
"For the kitchen table. Yellow and white. In a vase."
Griff is quiet for a beat, and then he laughs, short and genuine.
"I walked through your kitchen to get here." His voice has dropped out of the banter register into the one underneath, the one we use when the question is real. "There are flowers on your table and a blue mug on your counter and a blanket on a couch that never had anything on it but you. This house hasn't looked like that since you moved in. So how bad is it?"
"Bad."
"Scale of one to bought-a-second-chair?"
"Past the chair. Past the groceries. Past the flowers." I look at the water. "She's getting close to the notebook."
Griff's eyes drop to my cargo pocket, where the corner of the notebook presses against the fabric.
He's never asked about it. More than a decade of friendship and he's never once asked what I write on the deck in the evenings, what goes in the small leather-bound book that moves with me from deployment to deployment, from house to house, from the field to this quiet stretch of water.
He's seen me pull it out. He's seen me put it away. He's drawn his own conclusions, and the fact that he's kept those conclusions to himself is part of why I trust him with everything else.
"Getting close how?"
"She doesn't push. She sits beside me while I write and doesn't look. She heard me mention the first poem I wrote, in the field, and she filed it without asking for more." The restraint Ireland has shown around the notebook is its own pressure, gentler and more dangerous than any direct question. "The restraint has a direction, Griff. She's giving me room to decide, and we both know what I'm going to decide."
"The restraint has a direction." He turns the phrase over like he's weighing it. "You're telling me a woman who lives in your house and sleeps in your bed and puts flowers on your kitchen table is giving you room to decide, and you're still holding the line."
"The notebook is mine."
"Everything in the house used to be yours. Now there's a blue mug on the counter and I have it on reliable authority that there are now four towels and a washcloth in the bathroom. You let her in everywhere else." He sets the beer down and looks at me straight, the bluntness that Nox calls his defining feature and that I've relied on for more years than either of us would admit to counting. "The wall you're holding isn't a wall anymore,Boone. It's a line in the sand, and she's standing on the other side of it waiting for you to decide she's allowed to step over."
The water moves against the shore below the deck, steady and unhurried, and the rhythm of it is the rhythm I write to.
Griff finishes his beer and reaches for another and doesn't push further, because pushing once is his style. Pushing twice is not.
"How's Nox?" I ask.
"Nox is Nox. She traced a communication signature to the handler's network and told me about it while simultaneously critiquing my filing system." The way he talks about her is the same way I hear myself talk about Ireland, and the recognition is precise and uncomfortable. "She's worried about Ireland. Not professionally. Personally. She said Falk is going to be hard when it comes out."
"It will be."
"You ready for that?"
"Ready is planning. I'll be present. That's what she needs."
He nods. The distinction matters to both of us: ready implies control over outcomes, present implies commitment without illusion. Griff learned the difference the hard way. I learned it in field hospitals where being ready didn't save anyone but being present sometimes did.
He leaves and the six-pack is lighter by four.
