Page 43 of Dissonance

He kisses the top of my head, chin resting there, holding me close. The walls I’ve been holding rigid since that word landed in the clinical air of that room—the fear, the shock, the sheer unpreparedness of it all—cracks open. I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my face hard against him, breathing in cedar and clean air and that scent that always lingers, like a forest after rain.

His hand slides down my spine, slow and sure, the fingers tangled in my hair flexing.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers. “Both of you.”

Both of you.

I don’t say anything. I just hold on.

Chapter Nineteen

Lockie

She’s quiet.

Not the quiet I know from her when she’s focused, working through a problem, running calculations. This is the quiet of someone who has been pushed outside themselves and doesn’t know the way back.

Baby.

I keep my eyes on the road, the car moving through traffic, hands turning the wheel, foot finding the brake at the lights, all of it happening without conscious thought.

She hasn’t said a word since the parking lot, arms wrapped around herself, careful of the brace, eyes fixed on something beyond the window that isn’t the city. I don’t push. Every question I form inside my head stays unvoiced.

“You okay?” I ask eventually, because the silence has stretched past the point where staying quiet feels like its own kind of pressure. She doesn’t answer, just nods once, small and automatic. I’m not sure it wasn’t a reflex from the moving car. I swallow and try again. “Wrist still hurting?”

Two for two on dumbass questions, Lockie.

“A little,” she murmurs after a pause long enough that I’d almost let it go.

We drive another block. Then another. I note the turnoff for a shopping center, think about whether she’d want to stop, and decide against it. She’s somewhere I can’t reach, and pushing will make it worse.

Yet questions keep surfacing, ones I haven’t let myself think about. Not properly. There’s been no room between her falling, urgent care, watching her shrink in front of me. Thea’s first. Everything else is second. That’s where I am right now, and it’s the only place I can afford to be.

So I keep driving.

“Can you take me to my office?”

The question’s almost jarring after sitting so long in silence. She’s still facing the window, chin angled down.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home instead? It’s been a long day and—”

“Please,” she whispers, and when she finally turns her head, she looks wrecked. Not upset or panicked, just…hollowed out.

“Okay,” I say quietly, flicking on my indicator for downtown.

The traffic thickens the closer we get to her building, late afternoon tipping into evening. I don’t try to fill the silence again. There’s nothing useful I could say at the moment anyway. I just drive.

Pulling next to the curb, I shift into park. Neither of us moves for a beat. Then she unbuckles and reaches for her bag by her feet. I reach for the door handle, ready to get out and walk her inside.

“I need to be alone,” she says.

I go still.

“Thea—”

“Please.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “I just need…” she trails off, gaze casting down as she shakes her head.

Every instinct I have is telling me not to let her go in there alone, not like this. That we need to talk. But I’m trying to give her what she wants. So I let my hand fall from the door.