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He didn’t push for answers. He let her eat, not filling the silence with awkward chitchat, and she was grateful for it. But she could see the questions sitting behind his eyes, patient and present.

She set down her fork.

“I got a migraine.” There was no way around mentioning that.

He nodded. “I figured. I looked up the medication while you were sleeping. Discovered it was for migraines.”

Of course he’d looked it up.

“They hit me hard sometimes. The lights in the café, the noise. It triggered one.”

He nodded. Took a drink of his coffee. She waited for the follow-up questions, but they didn’t come, and for a second, she thought she’d gotten away with her secret. The same way she’d gotten away with it her whole life. Simple explanation, accepted without pushback, move on.

Then he set his cup down. “Can I ask you something?”

Or maybe not. “Yeah?”

“Before those people came in, you were fine. We were talking, you were laughing. You were yourself.” He met her eyes. “Then the room filled up, and within two minutes, you couldn’t walk. The migraine explains the headache. It doesn’t explain your eyes.”

Her chest tightened. Shit. “My eyes?”

“They were jumping. Person to person, face to face. Every time they landed on someone, they locked on, and I could see something happening behind them that I didn’t understand. And whatever it was, you were trying to stop it and you couldn’t.”

Nobody had ever described it to her from the outside before. She’d never let anyone close enough to see it, and the few times it had happened in public she’d gotten herself out before anyone could look closely enough to notice.

Ryder had noticed. Because of course he had.

She could deflect. She had decades of practice. Migraines, nerves, not good with people. The script was polished smooth from decades of use.

But he’d carried her home. He’d sat in a chair all night. He’d made her breakfast, and he was sitting across this table with no judgment on his face and the question in his eyes was honest.

She wanted to give him the truth. Not owed it. Wanted it.

“My brain works differently from other people’s.” She looked at her coffee rather than at him. “It’s always been that way. Since I was a kid.”

She took a breath. This was the part she’d never said out loud. “You know the security window I found yesterday you were so impressed with? The connections in the data that nobody else saw?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s how my brain is wired. It finds patterns in everything. Data, systems, financial records. It sees connections that aren’t obvious and assembles them into a picture.”

He was listening. Completely still.

“That ability doesn’t turn off. So when I say my brain finds patterns in everything, I mean everything.” She took a breath. “When I look at people, my brain does the same thing. Every detail I can see, it grabs.”

“What kinds of details?”

“Anything it can find. The way someone’s shirt is wrinkled. A tan line on their finger. The brand of their shoes.” She looked down at her plate. “Each detail connects to the next one, and my brain starts building a story about that person whether I want it to or not. Patterns.”

“And it doesn’t stop.”

She looked up. “No. It cascades. Each detail feeds the next one, and the more I look, the more I see, and I can’t turn it off. One person, I can usually manage. A room full of people…”

“Your brain tries to read all of them at once.”

“Yes. Reads every detail of every person, and instead of just glossing over it or filing it away, it starts attaching configurations and schemas to it. I can’t just stop. The more people I’m around at one time, the worse it is.”

Her voice was rough, but clearing her throat wouldn’t help. “That’s what happened in the café. Every person who walked through that door, my brain latched on. I was trying to stop it and I couldn’t.”