“I feel like we’d understand each other.”
“Ian.”
He finally looks at me. The performance is good—the easy set of his shoulders, the slight amusement at the corner of his mouth—but I’ve been watching it for three weeks, and I know every seam. I know the precise angle at which his chin lifts when he’s deflecting. I know the way his eyes land on me and then move away again just a half-second too fast when the thing he’s not saying is sitting too close to the surface.
“Eat something,” he says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Sophia—”
“He said he’d be here, Ian. That was the plan, right?”
He nods.
“Then why isn’t he here?”
“He’s got a lot of shit to deal with, Sophia. It’s not like he can just walk away, get on a plane, and forget about the danger he’d put you in if his every step isn’t curated.”
“I know that. But… twenty-one days, Ian,” I say it quietly. Not accusatory. Just a fact I need to put somewhere outside my own chest. “Not a word. Not a single thing to prove he’s okay. Has he ever gone this long without contact?”
Ian leans back against the counter. Crosses his arms. Theamusement fades, replaced by something more carefully neutral. “He’s gone longer.”
“How much longer?”
A beat. Just a beat, but it tells me everything. “Longer.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
I look at him steadily. He looks back, and for a moment I see the thing underneath—just the edge of it, just enough—before he folds it back with the practiced ease of a man who has been folding it for weeks.
“He knows where we are,” Ian says. “He knows you’re here. That hasn’t changed.”
“And if he can’t contact us? If something happened and he’s not choosing the silence?—”
“He’s choosing it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know him.”
“Then tell me honestly. Does this feel like him choosing silence? Or does this feel like something else?”
The kitchen goes quiet. Outside, a cicada starts up and then stops, thinks better of it. The garden tap drips its thirty-second drip and goes still. Ian looks at the floor, and I watch his jaw work, and I wait, because I have learned how to wait. I have had twenty-one days of practice.
“He’s dealt with worse,” he says. To the floor, not to me.
“That’s what you said last week.”
“Because it’s still true.”
“Ian—”
“What do you want me to say?” He looks up, and the neutrality has cracked just slightly at the edges—notbroken, but stressed, the way a wall looks right before it cracks. There’s something in his eyes that he’s been keeping carefully out of them for weeks, and it’s right there now, just barely. “That I’m worried? Fine. Yes. I’m worried. I’ve been worried since day eight. But worried and panicking are two different things, and one of them is useful and one of them isn’t, so I’m choosing worried, and I’m choosing to trust the protocol, because that’s what he asked me to do, and I—” He stops. His throat moves. “That’s what he asked me to do.”
The way he says it—that small break before the repeat, the way it comes out like something he’s been gripping very tightly for a very long time—lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays there.
