“What happens tomorrow?” he asked.
“Coffee.”
“You complain about morning.”
“Work for two hours.”
“Rest.”
“I’ll argue.”
“I’ll win.”
“Unlikely.”
“Then?”
I thought of the future again.
Not as a vast road I had to map.
One ordinary day opening into the next.
“Then we come home.”
Reid’s hand settled over my heart.
“Together?”
I covered it with mine.
“Always.”
Part 3
Chapter 27
NOAH
I woke before the gulls began their argument on the roof.
That alone should have warned me the morning was wrong.
Reid usually rose first. He moved quietly through the apartment, but the place changed when he was awake—the mattress lifted beside me, pipes murmured behind the bathroom wall, the kettle clicked on in the kitchen. I had learned those sounds again before I learned half the rooms I had once lived in.
Today, darkness still pressed against the harbor windows when pain drew me out of sleep.
It began behind my right eye.
Not the violent, white-hot pressure that had followed the accident memory. This was the familiar daily ache with sharpened edges, as if someone had pushed a thin blade through the scar at my temple and left it there.
I took the medication from the bedside drawer without turning on the lamp.
Reid slept through it.
He lay facedown with one arm beneath the pillow, dark hair disordered across his forehead. The quilt had slipped low on his back. In sleep, none of the careful restraint remained in him. His mouth softened. His shoulders lost the tension they carried downstairs, in hospital corridors, and whenever I missed a step.
I watched him longer than I should have.
