Arlo didn't notice he'd stood up until the chair scraped softly back.
The room felt too small for the thoughts ricocheting inside his skull. Too full of old reflexes—threats, leverage, pre‑emptive strikes—that didn't fit against the image of Ariel on that table, fingers clawed in the paper, trusting Mara with a blade and him with the promise not to make it worse.
He moved to the narrow window instead.
Outside, the street was its usual, indifferent self. A car crawled past. A man walked his dog. A kid on a bike cut across the corner, hoodie flapping.
They had no idea there was a world inside this house held together by stitches and stubbornness and one girl's refusal to break the way everyone expected her to.
He pressed his palm lightly to the cool glass.
Once, that hand had been the thing people feared most about him. The reach. The signal. The gun it could summon with a curve of his fingers. The violence it promised.
Now he could still feel—faint, ghostlike—the memory of Ariel's hair against his wrist when she'd fallen asleep on his shoulder, the twitch of her fingers when he'd touched the mark on her back, the way her pulse had jumped under skin that had never been his to read.
He'd held worse things.
Weapons. Secrets. People's debts.
None of them had ever made him think the words deserve and better in the same breath as his own name.
Behind him, Chris shifted in his chair. "You look like someone swapped your script," he said quietly.
"Maybe they did," Arlo said.
"What are you going to do with that?" Chris asked.
Arlo thought of every instinct that had kept him alive this long—control, distance, ruthlessness. Of how each one had cracked a little the moment Ariel had looked him in the eye in the depot and put her hand in his.
"Try not to ruin it," he said.
Chris snorted. "Ambitious," he said. "For you."
Arlo's mouth twitched. "You're not wrong."
He turned from the window.
"We start with the buyer," he said, the familiar steel slipping back into his voice, but tempered now. "Whoever signed off on that device doesn't get to breathe easy again."
Chris's gaze flicked to the hall, toward Ariel's room. "And with her?" he asked.
Arlo met his eyes. "With her," he said slowly, "I start by listening when she says stop. By not flinching when she screams. By letting her change the rules even when every part of me is wired to write them."
Chris studied him for a moment, then nodded once. "Good," he said. "Because like it or not, you're in it now."
"I noticed," Arlo said.
He slipped the dead tracker out of his pocket and set it on the table between them, the tiny gray shape suddenly symbolic of far more than tech.
"Someone thought this would make her easier to control," he said. "Easier to find. Easier to use."
"They were wrong," Chris said.
"Yes," Arlo replied. "They were."
And under the words was the vow he hadn't quite learned how to say out loud yet:
Whatever else he was—criminal, manipulator, storm—he would not be one more person who treated Ariel Smith as a thing to be wired, watched, used.
If she was going to let him stand in the softness she carried like a risk, then for once in his life, he would learn how to stand without breaking it.
Dinner felt like a truce no one had officially declared.
Mara bullied everyone to the table as the sky outside dimmed to that blue‑gray that made the streetlights blink on one by one. The safe house's small dining nook looked almost cozy under the yellow pendant lamp—mismatched chairs, a scarred wooden table, plates already set.
"Sit," Mara ordered, plunking down a serving bowl in the center. "Eat. Hydrate. Anyone who says they're not hungry gets a lecture about shock."
Ariel lowered herself carefully into the chair closest to the wall, so nothing could move behind her. The new bandage pulled when she reached for the edge of the table; she bit back a wince. Her side throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Her back felt like someone had installed a hot coin under the skin.
Arlo slid into the seat on her right without asking, leaving enough space that his elbow wouldn't accidentally brush her. Chris took the chair on her left, angled slightly toward her, shoulder a barrier between her and the rest of the room. Mara claimed the end, like a referee.
The food was simple—pasta, garlic bread, a salad that mostly existed so Mara could point at something green. Steam curled from the bowl.
Ariel stared at it for a moment. Her stomach twisted between hunger and nausea.
"You need fuel to heal," Mara said, softer now. "Small bites. No heroics."citymedicalcentre
Ariel twirled a forkful of pasta, the motion slow, testing the limits of her back. "If I keel over into the bowl, I'm haunting you," she muttered.
"Get in line," Mara said. "You'd be the least scary ghost in this house."
"Rude," Ariel said, but some of the tightness in her shoulders eased.
Chris watched her take the first bite like it was an exam. When she swallowed without flinching, his grip on his fork loosened.
"Better than Mara's hospital food?" he asked.
"Anything's better than Mara's hospital food," Ariel said. "I'm pretty sure one of those soups was just warm regret."
Mara pointed her fork at her. "Keep insulting my cooking and see if I don't prescribe kale smoothies for a week," she said.
Arlo, who had been silent so far, glanced at the salad bowl with visible suspicion. "That sounds like a human rights violation," he said.
"That sounds like fiber," Mara shot back. "Eat the leaves, Johnson."
His mouth curved, small but real. He speared exactly one leaf, chewed it like it had personally offended him, and then reached for the bread.
Domestic. The word flickered through Ariel's mind, foreign and fragile. Four people at a table, passing bowls, bickering over salad. It felt borrowed from some other life—a quiet one, with worries like deadlines and bills instead of bugs under the skin and betrayal on loop.
Her chest ached with how much she wanted to keep it.
"So," Mara said, after a few minutes of clinking cutlery and awkward silence. "No shop talk for the first ten minutes. House rule."
"Since when?" Chris asked.
"Since I invented it just now," she said. "My table, my rules."reddit
Ariel picked at a piece of bread, tearing it into small pieces. "What do people even talk about when they're not plotting to overthrow crime rings?" she asked.
"Weather," Arlo said dryly.
"Sports," Chris added.
"Gossip," Mara said. "I vote gossip."
"About what?" Ariel asked. "The neighbor's potted plants? We don't know anyone here."
Mara's eyes sparked. "On the contrary," she said. "I've got excellent gossip about this table."
Chris narrowed his eyes. "Mara," he warned.
She ignored him. "For instance," she went on, "our illustrious employer here has voluntarily eaten a vegetable. That's character development."iamcharlesbakerharris.wordpress
Arlo lifted his brows. "Careful," he said. "You keep narrating my growth arc and I'll start charging you royalties."
Ariel snorted, then winced as the motion tugged her back. "Ow," she muttered.
Immediately, three sets of eyes snapped to her.
"I'm fine," she said quickly. "Just… forgot my spine hates joy now."
"Pain level?" Mara asked.
"Five," Ariel said. "And climbing the more everyone stares at me."
"Eat a little more, then bed and meds," Mara decided. "You can listen to one stupid sitcom episode and then I'm doping you."healthdirect
"A sitcom," Ariel repeated. "We have sitcoms in the apocalypse now."
"It's not the apocalypse," Chris said quietly.
She glanced at him. "Feels like it," she said.
He didn't argue.
Arlo broke a piece of bread in half and slid it onto her plate without comment, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. "Carbs help with nausea," he said. "So I'm told."
She arched a brow. "By who?"
He hesitated a fraction of a second too long.
"Mara," he admitted.
"Snitch," Mara said.
Ariel smiled, small and crooked. "Noted," she said. She ate the bread.
The knot in the room loosened by degrees.
They drifted into safer topics—Mara ranting about a former supervisor who thought duct tape counted as a sterile dressing, Chris recounting a disastrous undercover op where he'd had to pretend to be a yoga instructor. Ariel's short laughs were careful, as if she was testing each one for pain.
At one point, she set her fork down and pressed her fingers lightly to the table, grounding herself.
"I used to have book club nights like this," she said, surprising herself. "Sort of. Fewer weapons. More sticky notes."
"Berry and Harry?" Chris asked softly.
She tensed, then deliberately made herself relax. "Sometimes," she said. "Sometimes just regulars from the shop. We'd sit on the floor between the shelves, eat whatever someone brought, argue about whether slow burn counts if they kiss in book one."reddit
"And?" Arlo asked, genuinely curious. "Does it?"
She studied him. The fact that he cared, even about something that small, pricked at something tender inside her.
"Depends," she said. "On the intent. On whether the kiss is a weapon or a beginning."
He held her gaze for a beat too long.
Mara cleared her throat loudly. "Absolutely not," she said. "No metaphors at my dinner table. You two can do longing eye contact later."
Color climbed Ariel's neck. She looked down at her plate, suddenly fascinated by a stray piece of basil.
Chris stabbed a tomato with more force than necessary.
"Can we skip to the part where we plot revenge again?" he muttered.
"Ten minutes aren't up," Mara said, glancing at the clock. "I'm timing you."
The clock on the wall ticked toward the end of their temporary reprieve.
For those few minutes, though, the worst of the world stayed outside the safe house walls. Inside, there was just the clink of cutlery, the murmur of overlapping voices, the occasional groan when Ariel shifted wrong and the immediate chorus of, "You okay?" that followed.
Ariel soaked it in quietly.
She knew it wouldn't last. There were still recordings waiting. Names to untangle. A buyer who had thought her body was fair game for surveillance.
But right now, Mara was threatening to hide vegetables in Arlo's coffee, Chris was arguing that his fake yoga cover had been very convincing, and Arlo—Arlo, who had built a life out of sharp edges—was cutting his garlic bread into smaller pieces and nudging one closer to her side of the plate without looking at her.
Softness, she realized, wasn't always grand gestures or perfect safety.
Sometimes it was just this:
A table. A meal. People who had seen her stitched and screaming and still sat close enough that their shoulders almost touched, careful not to bump the places that hurt.
For the first time since the warehouse, she let herself believe that maybe she could keep pieces of this, even when the rest of it went back to being sharp.
"Time," Mara said eventually, tapping her glass with her fork. "Shop talk resumes. Who wants to go first?"romance
Three pairs of eyes lifted from their plates.
Ariel swallowed the last bite of bread, pain and warmth warring in her chest.
"I do," she said.
Her voice was steadier than she felt.
Arlo turned toward her fully, the air around him shifting from awkward domestic to intent.
"Okay," he said. "Then we start where we always should.
With what you want next."
Mara declared a moratorium on blood, bugs, and buyers for the rest of the afternoon.
"No more talking about things that beep inside people," she said, ladling soup into mismatched bowls. "Tonight, we pretend we're a normal, deeply dysfunctional household that argues over bread instead of body counts."
The kitchen smelled like garlic and tomatoes. A pot of soup simmered on the stove, steam fogging the window. Someone—probably Chris—had sliced a loaf of bread into thick, uneven pieces. There was even a small plate of butter, dented from knife marks.
Ariel shuffled in last.
Mara had threatened to carry her if she refused to leave the bed; Ariel had called her bluff until she saw the glint in Mara's eye and decided stairs under her own power were the lesser indignity. Now she moved carefully, one hand on the wall, the other pressed to her side out of habit.
Chris rose halfway from his chair. "You good?"
"No," she said. "But I'm upright, which seems to be the theme of the day."
"Progress," Mara said, nudging out a chair with her foot. "Throne for the stab victim. Sit."
Ariel lowered herself onto the chair with painstaking care. Both cuts protested, but the dull throb was better than the earlier burn. The seat felt too hard; the table felt too far; everything in her body felt… occupied.
Arlo sat opposite her, sleeves rolled to his forearms, as if he'd been drafted into actual kitchen prep. There was a faint smear of flour on his wrist, betraying that he'd at least tried to help.
His eyes did a quick, assessing sweep—color, breathing, how tightly she held herself—before he relaxed a fraction.
Chris took the chair to Ariel's left, an unconscious barrier between her and the doorway. Mara sat at the other end, in easy reach of the pot.
It was the most people the little table had seen in a long time.
"Ground rules," Mara said, setting a bowl in front of each of them. "One: everyone eats at least half. I don't care if you're not hungry. Trauma burns calories like a bonfire. Two: if anyone brings up Harry, the buyer, or surgical procedures while I'm chewing, I will throw vegetables at you. Three: Ariel is allowed to complain, but only in complete sentences."
Ariel managed a faint smile. "What happens if I use fragments?" she asked.
"Then Arlo has to finish them," Mara said.
All three of them looked at him.
"I object to this rule," he said.
"Objection overruled," Mara replied.
The soup was hot enough to send curls of steam up to fog Ariel's glasses. She cupped her hands around the bowl, letting the warmth seep into her fingers.
The first spoonful felt like a negotiation with her stomach. It accepted it, then begrudgingly asked for another.
"Is this… edible?" she asked, squinting into the bowl.
"I cooked it," Mara said. "So yes."
"I chopped things," Chris said.
"I supervised from a safe distance," Arlo added.
Ariel's eyebrow arched. "So this is a group effort?" she said. "No wonder it tastes confused."
Chris snorted. Mara grinned. Even Arlo's mouth twitched.
They ate in relative quiet for a few minutes—spoons clinking, occasional soft curses when someone misjudged the heat.
Ariel's back ached, a deep, pulsing reminder of what had been hiding under her skin. Every time she shifted, the bandage tugged. She tried not to think about the little steel dish on Mara's counter, or the tiny, dead thing inside it that had been listening to her heartbeat.
"Stop spiraling," Mara said, without looking up.
"I didn't say anything," Ariel protested.
"You don't have to," Mara said. "Your shoulders do."
Ariel exhaled and tried to drop them. "I just… how long was it there?" she asked. "How many times did someone sit with a pair of headphones and listen to me sleep? Or shelve books. Or sing off‑key when Berry refused to put on music."
Bread froze halfway to Chris's mouth.
Mara pointed her spoon at Ariel. "I said no bugs at dinner," she reminded. "But since you snuck it in under 'existential crisis,' here's the deal: we don't know how long it was active. We know it's not active now. We know it was put there without your consent. That is the part we can do something about. The rest is just brain gremlins chewing on maybes."
Arlo's jaw clenched. "We'll find out who ordered it," he said. "And what they heard. If anything."
Ariel's gaze slid to him. "And then what?" she asked. "You add another name to your list?"
"Yes," he said simply.
She held his eyes for a moment, then nodded once. "Okay," she said. "Add one for me too."
Chris looked at her sharply. "You don't have to—"
"I don't want to hold the knife," she said. "But I want it on record that if someone asks how I feel about their ears burning, the answer is: enthusiastically supportive."
Mara clinked her spoon against the bowl. "Noted," she said. "Revenge later. Carbs now."
The conversation drifted, like Mara had intended.
Chris told a story about a safe house in Prague where the only thing in the pantry for a week had been canned peaches and instant noodles.
"We got very creative," he said. "And by 'we' I mean 'the one guy who knew how to boil water without starting a fire.'"
"Wasn't you, was it," Ariel said.
"Rude," he said. "Accurate, but rude."
Mara talked about a stint in a rural clinic where a sheep had wandered into the waiting room and refused to leave.
"I stitched a guy's head while he held on to a disgruntled ewe," she said. "Zero out of ten, do not recommend."
Even Arlo contributed, grudgingly, with an anecdote about a meeting that had been derailed when a cat had climbed onto his conference table, sat directly on a contract, and refused to move unless bribed with ham.
"You own a cat?" Ariel asked, startled.
"No," he said. "The cat owns the building. I am allowed to rent."
Something about the image of Arlo Johnson, storm in a suit, being held hostage by a fat tabby cat almost made her choke on her soup.
The edges of the day softened.
For a little while, the table was its own small world—one where the worst thing to navigate was Mara stealing bread off Ariel's plate and Chris arguing about whether soup counted as a full meal.
"You're hovering," Ariel said suddenly, mid‑bite.
It took her a second to realize she'd directed it at Arlo.
He blinked. "I'm sitting," he said.
"You're sitting with gloom," she corrected. "Your shoulders are doing that thing where they're trying to strangle your neck. What's going on in there?"
His instinct was to deflect. To make a joke about indigestion or kale. Instead, he found himself answering honestly.
"I keep thinking about your back," he said. "About how I didn't notice sooner. About how many rooms you were in where I thought you were… untouched."
The word landed with weight.
Ariel's spoon stilled. Chris's jaw tightened.
"You weren't supposed to notice," she said, after a beat. "That was the point. They put it where no one looks. I don't even look."
"I should have," he said.
"You saw a lot," she replied. "More than anyone else. If you spend your life looking for wounds, that becomes the only thing you see. You noticed I was hurting. That counts."
He studied her. "You're very generous with people who fail you," he said.
"Selective," she corrected. "Harry doesn't get this speech. You do."
The admission surprised even her.
Something flickered in his expression—surprise, then something softer, quickly masked.
Mara cleared her throat. "As much as I enjoy this round of 'Who Blames Themselves Most,'" she said, "I'm invoking rule four: if conversation gets too heavy, we pivot."
"There wasn't a rule four," Chris pointed out.
"There is now," she said. "I'm drunk on power."
Ariel leaned back carefully, letting the banter float around her. The pain in her back had settled into a steady ache, but the meds were starting to take the sharper edge off. Warmth spread from the soup, from the room, from the simple, stubborn fact that for the first time in days, she was sharing a table instead of a trauma.
Her eyes drifted to each of them in turn.
Mara, pretending not to watch the way Ariel's hands moved, tallying every wince against some internal ledger but choosing jokes instead of lectures.
Chris, arguing about soup but keeping one foot tapped on an anxious rhythm only he seemed to hear, as if ready to spring up at the slightest wrong sound.
Arlo, awkward in the domesticity, hands too big for the delicate business of buttering bread, eyes too sharp for such a soft room, yet staying. Learning, second by second, that care wasn't a transaction he could control.
Something in her chest loosened.
They weren't a family. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the way storybooks meant it.
But they were here.
Eating the same too‑salty soup at the same too‑small table, bound by more than just fear or debt. By choices. By the decision to keep showing up in rooms that held both pain and the possibility of something gentler.
Ariel dipped her bread into her soup, took a bite, and decided—quietly, stubbornly—that whoever had put that device in her body had misread the experiment.
They'd been listening for weakness.
They'd accidentally recorded the sound of something else:
A girl being hurt and held.
A man learning how not to break what he touched.
A small, mismatched table where, for a few stolen minutes, the storm existed outside the walls instead of inside their bones.
She swallowed, winced, then smiled faintly.
"Okay," she said. "Someone tell me the most embarrassing thing they've ever done in a kitchen. I need leverage for future negotiations."
Mara's eyes lit up.
"Oh, do I have stories," she said.
And just like that, the room tilted a fraction more toward light.
Arlo's phone buzzed against the table just as Ariel was laughing at Mara's story about almost setting a microwave on fire.
He glanced at the screen, and the warmth in his face shut off like a switch.
"Johnson," he said, already pushing back his chair.
Mara clocked the change instantly. "Work?"
"Something like that," he said. His eyes flicked to Ariel. "Eat. Then sleep. I'll be back before you decide to do anything stupid."
"Define stupid," she said.
"Anything involving stairs, files, or rebellion," he said.
She gave him a tired half‑salute with her spoon. "No promises."
He hesitated—just a breath, just enough that all three of them felt it—then turned and walked out, phone to his ear, voice dropping low as he disappeared down the hall.
The house felt quieter without him, like someone had turned the storm volume down.
Ariel's eyelids drooped not long after.
The pain meds, the soup, the day's endless waves of adrenaline and crash… it all caught up at once. She yawned, winced when the stretch tugged her bandages, and pushed her bowl away.
"Tap out?" Mara asked.
"I'm… tired," Ariel admitted. "In a way sleep doesn't fix. But I'll start there."
Chris stood immediately. "I'll walk you."
She rolled her eyes, but there was no real bite in it. "To my own room. In the same house. With no stairs," she pointed out.
"Humor him," Mara said. "He gets twitchy when you're out of sight for more than thirty seconds."
Chris didn't deny it.
Ariel rose slowly, hand pressed to her side, back stiff. Chris hovered to her left, close enough to catch, far enough not to crowd. The short walk to her room felt longer now, every muscle tired.
At the door, she paused, leaning lightly on the frame.
"You going to stand guard again?" she asked.
"I was thinking of sitting on the floor outside like an overgrown guard dog," he said. "But I can upgrade to a chair if the image bothers you."
"It doesn't," she said softly. "Just… don't forget to sleep too."
"Bossy," he murmured.
"Learned from the best," she said, tipping her head back toward the kitchen where Mara clinked dishes.
He helped her ease onto the bed, adjusting the pillow so she could stay on her side. She hissed when the bandage pulled, then let out a slow breath.
"If you need anything—" he started.
"I'll scream," she said. "Apparently that works."
His throat tightned at the memory, but he managed a crooked smile. "Yeah," he said. "It does."
She reached out, fingers brushing his wrist—light, brief, deliberate. "Go," she murmured. "Before we both fall asleep here and Mara yells about my posture."
He squeezed her hand once, then pulled back. "Door stays open?"
"Yeah," she said. "Door stays open."
He left it ajar, the way she'd asked, and stepped back into the hallway.
By the time he reached the kitchen, Mara had stacked the bowls in the sink and was rinsing them with the efficient, almost aggressive focus of someone who didn't trust stillness.
"She down?" Mara asked without turning.
"Yeah," Chris said, dropping into a chair. "Out cold. Or close."
Mara shut off the tap and wiped her hands on a towel. "Good," she said. "Her brain needs the break."
He watched her for a moment, the familiar lines of her movements oddly soothing—the way she hung the towel just so, the way she nudged a mug half a centimeter to line it up.
"You okay?" she asked, finally facing him.
He laughed, a quiet, humorless sound. "You should stop asking questions you already know the answer to," he said.
"I like hearing you say it," she replied. "Cuts down on the macho posturing."
He rubbed a hand over his face. "I hate this," he admitted. "The waiting. The… not being able to do anything but sit there while other people cut pieces out of her."
Mara slid into the chair opposite, folding her legs beneath her. "You did do something," she said. "You didn't break down the door and make me accidentally stab her lung. That's progress."
He huffed. "High bar."
"You'd be surprised how many men fail at 'don't make it worse,'" she said dryly.
He stared at the table. "When she screamed…" He stopped, jaw tightening. "I was back there. In the hospital. Tiny room. Thin walls. Listening to a baby cry and not being allowed in. It felt the same. Helpless and… wrong."
Mara's expression softened. "You were a kid," she said. "You couldn't do anything then."
"I'm not a kid now," he said. "And it still feels like I'm standing on the wrong side of a door half the time."
She leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Look at me," she said.
He did.
"You are not on the wrong side," she said, voice steady. "You are exactly where she keeps putting you—between her and the worst of it. At her back. In the hallway. On the floor outside her room. That matters more than whatever heroics you think you're failing at."
He swallowed. "She shouldn't need me at all," he said. "She should be arguing with customers about late fees, not… learning the difference between types of stitches."
"She shouldn't need any of this," Mara said. "But life doesn't care about should. It cares about who shows up when the bad thing happens. You showed up. You're still here."
He studied her face—the tired eyes, the hair escaping her bun, the little smudge of flour on her cheek she hadn't noticed.
"You're here too," he said quietly.
She rolled her eyes, but there was warmth in it. "Of course I am," she said. "You two are a full‑time job. And you pay terribly."
"You could leave," he said. "Take a normal hospital job. Treat sprained ankles and grumpy old men instead of gunshot wounds and… trackers."
"I tried normal," she said. "It was boring. And the grumpy old men were somehow worse than you and Johnson combined."
He snorted.
Her gaze softened again. "Also," she added, "you didn't pay me in money at first. You paid me in getting kids out of places they shouldn't have been. In making sure the ones I patched up didn't end up back on my table a week later. That buys a lot of loyalty."
"Is that what this is?" he asked. "Loyalty?"
She tilted her head. "Partly," she said. "Partly stubbornness. Partly the fact that I like you."
He blinked. "You have terrible taste."
"Obviously," she said. "I work here."
Silence settled for a moment, easier than before.
"You know you're allowed to lean, right?" she said. "On me. On her. On whoever isn't currently stitched together by my questionable needlework."
"I lean," he protested.
"You hover," she corrected. "You press against walls until your shoulders bruise. You sit outside doors. You don't… ask."
He looked away. "Asking feels like… taking," he said. "And I've taken enough from people who didn't owe me anything."
She reached across the table and tapped his knuckles, light but deliberate. "Newsflash," she said. "You're not the only one in this house who gets to give. Ariel isn't a project. I'm not a service. We're here because we choose to be. Letting us… do the care thing… that's not taking. That's participating."
He let that sit, turning it over like a foreign object.
"What about you?" he asked. "Who do you lean on?"
She smiled, small and wry. "I have my moments," she said. "Sometimes I go home and yell at my plants. Sometimes I call my sister and let her talk my ear off about her cat. Sometimes…" She shrugged. "Sometimes I sit in a safe house kitchen and poke emotionally stunted men until they admit they're scared."
"I didn't say scared," he muttered.
"You didn't have to," she said.
His throat worked. "I am," he admitted, so quietly it was almost a breath. "Scared."
She squeezed his hand once before letting go. "Good," she said. "Means you understand the stakes."
He let out a long breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "What if I mess it up?" he asked. "What if I miss something again?"
"Then you'll fix what you can," she said. "And I'll stitch what I can. And Ariel will yell at both of us, and we'll all keep going until the next bad thing. That's the deal."
He almost laughed. "Terrible deal," he said.
"Best one on the table," she countered.
Footsteps sounded faintly from upstairs—or maybe he just imagined them, tuned so tightly to Ariel's movements that every creak felt like a summons.
Mara glanced at the clock. "Go check on her," she said. "You won't relax until you do. Just… don't wake her up hovering over her like a horror movie."
"I don't hover," he protested again.
"You loom," she corrected. "It's worse. So soften the loom."
He shook his head, but he was already pushing his chair back.
"Hey, Chris," she said.
He paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"
"You're doing good," she said simply.
Something in his chest eased at that. "You too," he said.
He took the stairs two at a time, then forced himself to slow down at the top, heart thudding a little too fast.
The hallway was dim, lit only by the spill of light from a small lamp near the stairs. Ariel's door was still ajar, just as he'd left it.
He knocked lightly with his knuckles, out of habit, then nudged it open.
"Ariel?" he murmured. "Just checking—"
The words died in his throat.
The bed was empty.
The blanket was half‑tossed back, pillow indented, but there was no Ariel—no tangle of hair on the pillow, no small, curled shape on her side.
For a heartbeat, his brain refused to process it.
He took a step in, eyes sweeping the corners like she might somehow be hiding behind the dresser or the chair.
"Ariel?" he said again, louder.
Silence answered.
The window was closed, latch still in place.
The bathroom door was open, light off, sink dry.
She was gone.