Miles called just after sunrise, voice brisk and distant, too relieved to be decent.
"She's being discharged today," he said, each word clipped like he'd pared it with a knife. "You can handle the rest, right?"
Zane heard the subtext as clearly as if Miles had said it: I'm done performing.
The line clicked dead a beat too fast. Zane stood in his kitchen with the phone in his hand while the espresso machine hissed and quieted. Beyond the window, the city lifted its pale shoulders to the morning. He watched the thin plume of steam and thought of the way Willow had said thank you yesterday—as if the words cost her something and she still paid.
He set the cup aside, untasted.
By the time he reached the hospital, the corridor had finished its night-molt into day. The charged hush of midnight had given way to soft-sole traffic and the clink of metal against metal. Inside Willow's room, the monitors were already unhooked; what remained were the small, domestic traces of leaving: a folded discharge packet, a pharmacy bag with typed instructions, a plastic tote with yesterday's flowers re-wrapped in damp paper. The machinery had let her go. The room looked startled without her tethered to it.
She sat by the window in a chair someone had dragged close to the light. New sling, pale sweater, hair caught hastily at the nape. The cast made her look both fragile and invincible, like porcelain that had elected not to crack. She turned her face toward the glass, not the door. Sun found the edge of her cheekbone and stayed there.
"Ready?" Zane asked from the threshold.
Her eyes slid to him. "For what—freedom," she said, "or the next act in the play?"
His mouth tightened. Did she mean life, or did she see the seam? Prudence said let it pass.
"The nurse will bring papers," he said. "I'll take you home."
Something moved behind her expression—confusion, a flicker of disbelief, a flint-spark of wary gratitude. She looked away first. Kara arrived with a clipboard and a pen.
"Sign here, sweetie," the nurse said, brisk and kind. "And here, and this one means you promise to read the pamphlet about dizziness even though nobody ever does."
Willow's signature was elegant and controlled, the same loop each time. Contracts, releases, goodbyes—it didn't matter. The line she made through paper refused to shake.
"Wheelchair?" Kara offered.
"No." Willow's smile was polite, final. "I've sat enough."
Kara's glance flicked to Zane, making him complicit in the decision. He gave the smallest nod.
Zane lifted the bag before Willow could reach, and held out his arm. The look he gave her wasn't a question; it was an answer already made. She took his arm with her good one.
They took the elevator. She didn't speak. He didn't either. Between floors, the machine hummed their breathing back to them. When the doors parted, daylight noise rushed in—rolling carts, someone arguing with a vending machine, a toddler's sudden, delighted squeal.
Outside, the sun cut the parking lot into bright planes. His car glinted like a knife laid flat. It was black and sleek, every line deliberate, the kind of car that didn't just move—it announced.
She paused, head tilting. "Nice taste," she said, threading lightness through the words.
"It gets me places," he replied, thumb sparking the locks.
The MC20's door lifted with a quiet, precise sigh. Inside: stitched leather, cool carbon fiber, the faint clean scent that had become his signature—soap, cedar, something colder. He steadied the door, and when she angled her arm through the space, he moved closer without touching. The sling complicated everything; pain did the rest. Her breath snagged.
"I'm fine," she said, and flinched at the belt's first tug.
He leaned in.
Proximity changed the air. The heat of him, the line of his shoulder, the gravity of his focus—everything inside the cabin considered rearranging. Surprised, she looked up, straight into his eyes. For a suspended second, neither moved. The scent of him—soap, cedar, and something colder—closed the space between them. And without thought, memory rushed in: the taste of yesterday's kiss, the pull of it, the ruin and the want. She blinked too late. Color rose to her cheeks, sudden and traitorous.
He took the belt, guided it cleanly to the latch, eased the webbing so it didn't cut the sling. He was careful in a way that never felt performative. It felt… practiced. As if he'd trained himself to be near without bruising anything.
"There," he said, voice low, even. He stepped back with surgical precision, leaving no ghost of contact behind. The space he vacated held him anyway.
He circled, got in, and tapped the screen. "Type your address," he said. Not a command so much as the next thing happening.
Her fingers hovered a fraction too long. Then she entered it. Their reflections floated on the glass—his edges certain, hers paler, like someone fading in.
He started the engine.
The Maserati woke with a restrained growl that seemed to settle behind her sternum. He guided them onto the road and the car did what it was built to do—translate intention into motion without fanfare. The city unfolded in soft layers: a laundromat's neon OPEN sighing to life; a baker dusting a counter; a woman walking a dog that looked like regret in a sweater.
He drove like he did everything else—without waste. No jerks, no proofs. Just the steady assertion of control. His hands were quiet on the wheel. Willow watched them, then his profile. Not movie handsome. But attention had a shape, and he wore it like a precision instrument.
She turned her face to the window. Flowering trees spilled mild pink over the curb like dropped silk. On a corner, a man arranged knotted ropes of garlic like a prayer. A bus yawned. The city pretended it had never heard of anyone's pain.
The car took a narrow street beneath a lacework of branches and braked smoothly in front of a white-stone building with ivy curling up its side. Her name lived on the mailbox in faded gold. It looked smaller than she remembered. Or maybe she was bigger now, in all the worst ways.
Cool morning air carried damp earth and jasmine when he opened her door. He didn't offer his arm; he offered presence. The restraint was its own intimacy.
"Careful," he said.
"You really think I'll shatter?" The brittle edge in her mouth surprised them both.
He didn't answer. He held the door, then the bag, then the silence. On the short steps, her breath hitched once. He didn't comment. The key hid at the bottom of her bag—she knew it without looking; her fingers stiffened when she tried.
He unzipped the bag.
"What are you doing?"
"Helping."
"I didn't ask—"
"You will," he said, not unkindly. He found the key and turned it. The lock surrendered. "I don't wait for instructions."
The words shouldn't have sounded like a warning. They did.
Her apartment exhaled when the door opened. Books in double rows along one wall, some spined, some stacked. A faded rug holding the room together. A cream sofa dented into the shape of a life lived on it. A chipped mug on the coffee table holding three pens and a pair of scissors with tape stuck to one blade. The air smelled like lavender sachets and the memory of tea. It wasn't grand. It was hers.
He paused on the threshold as if asking the room's permission. Then he crossed to the table and set the bag where it made sense. He didn't move like a visitor. He moved like someone careful not to rearrange gravity.
"You should sit," he said.
"You really take orders well for someone who hates them."
"I didn't say I take them." He glanced up. "I said I follow what makes sense."
She lowered herself to the sofa and took stock of him in her space. Tall and dark in the smallness. Out of place and inevitable both. He belonged nowhere and anywhere, she thought. Useful men have that talent.
"You want tea?" she asked, words choosing themselves because others might betray her.
"I'll make it," he said. "For both of us."
She expected the quip, the deflection. She got competence.
He found the kettle without asking. Ran water until it went cold and filled it; set it on the stove; palmed a match and lit the burner with the economy of someone who grew up with gas flames and parents who cared about bills. He opened the cupboard and, with one look, found what he needed—jasmine and something black in a tin with a foreign label. Two mugs side by side—one green, one black. Subconsciously, he assigned.
Steam climbed. He poured and let the leaves sink and bloom, then carried both cups back. He set hers on the side table by her right hand. He took the chair opposite, leaving the sofa between them like a border they'd both agreed to honor.
"Milk?" he asked.
She nodded.
He poured with a steadiness that made even this simple thing look like care. She watched the color change. She watched his hands. Thought of those hands hovering yesterday over the bed rail; the pinch at the corner of his mouth when he'd swallowed a word.
"Thank you," she said.
"You've said that before."
"I seem to mean it more this time."
The corner of his mouth gave. "Good."
Steam curled between them. The jasmine climbed into the room and laid itself against the lavender like two gentle animals trading warmth. He looked wrong and right here: tailored edges in a room that preferred soft corners; a man built for glass-walled offices holding a ceramic mug like he'd been handed a live thing.
"You don't have to stay," she said finally.
"I know." He let the first honesty land. Then, softer, almost to his cup: "I want to."
She looked away because it was safer. The thin curtain stirred in the current from the vent. Outside, a neighbor's bicycle clicked twice where it leaned against the rail. The world insisted on its small sounds. They took up space in the quiet.
"There are prescriptions in the bag," he said. "I'll put them on the counter." He stood. "You can tell me where you keep your pills. Or I can guess."
"You'll guess right anyway," she said, because he would.
He set the pharmacy sack on the counter, scanned the labels, slid a glass toward the sink with the heel of his hand.
Willow watched him from the sofa and felt something she did not want. Not trust. Not safety. Something more dangerous: the ease of another person in her space, moving as if ease is what people owe each other when pain has tried to make a meal of them.
She put a fingertip to the rim of her mug, tracing the circle. "Zane," she said, without inflection.
He turned at the sound of his name the way people do when they're new to hearing it from the person they want to hear it from.
"You kissed me yesterday," she said. Not accusation. Inventory.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He considered lying. Then he gave her the smallest truth that wouldn't break the room. "Because I wanted to," he said. He didn't dress it. He didn't apologize for it either. "And because you leaned two millimeters closer."
She held absolutely still. Memory flickered; he had noticed things most people didn't unless they had an agenda or a heart. Or both.
"I don't remember that," she said.
"I know."
They stood on the thin line between performance and something else, and the line held. She didn't step off it. Neither did he.
He returned to the chair. For a while, they were just two people drinking tea in the morning, cataloging each other through steam. Outside, a delivery truck hissed to a stop and then protested leaving. Upstairs, somebody's radio found the tail end of a ballad and cut it short.
The apartment's clock ticked. She could feel the gears of her plan notched and ready. And still, the quiet insisted on tenderness. That was the annoying thing about quiet: it had an opinion.
He broke it. "I'll come back later," he said. "If you need—"
"I'll be okay."
His eyes shifted a degree warmer and then cooled, like metal acknowledging heat and returning to form. "All right."
She watched him set the cup down and stand. He didn't check his phone; he didn't fill the space with words. He crossed to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. Turned back.
"Tell me where you keep the spare key," he said.
She arched a brow. "That's bold."
"It's practical," he said. "If your arm rebels, I'm not making you buzz me from the sidewalk."
She considered the risk and the leverage. "Top book on the third stack," she said. "Hollowed out. I don't keep anything inside."
He went to the stack, lifted the book—a battered hardcover with half the dust jacket gone—found the key and memorized the feel of it without pocketing it. He put it back, exact spine to exact space.
"I'll knock anyway," he said.
She said nothing. He'd given a time horizon to a lie, and the horizon had looked like patience instead of conquest. It unsettled her in the places plot doesn't reach.
He opened the door. Jasmine reached in from the hallway. His aftershave drifted as he did. He looked back once—not to check on her, but as if to fix her into a coordinate system he could navigate by later.
He left the way he did everything else: without waste. The door closed with that soft apartment hush, a sound like two cards pressed together and then released.
Willow sat very still. The tea cooled between her hands. Her apartment laid its familiar shadows back over her. The jasmine in the curtain breathed. The clock remembered how to tick.
She thought of the ride—engine in her ribs; his hands steady on the wheel—and decided it was just competence. The tea he made? Logistics. The kiss? A lapse dressed up as care. Men like Zane worship at the altar of control; when control stutters, they rename it decency.
Fine. She could work with that.
She rose and crossed to the window, the sling an accusation against her ribs, and watched the street reassemble into normal. Down there, people did not care who had rewritten whom. Up here, she would.
Zane wasn't a refuge. He was leverage with a jawline. He believed the amnesia. He'd built himself a quiet, useful fantasy—predictable, measured, almost noble. It made him the safest kind of collateral: the kind that would apologize while he held the door open to his own undoing.
Miles first. Always Miles. But every structure needs load-bearing points. Zane could be one.
Encourage the interactions. Let him be decent. Let him schedule "check-ins," carry bags, pour tea, say text me and mean it. Let Christy hear about it third-hand. Let Miles hear about it in a silence he can't name. Give the lie a pulse and call it recovery. If they wanted a story, she'd give them a better one—one that ended in regret.
She pictured it: Christy's smile going brittle at brunch; Miles's careful composure cracking the first time he saw Zane reach for the apartment keypad like it belonged to him; Zane—principled, exact—discovering too late that he'd been part of the instrument, not the melody. None of it required theatrics. Only proximity. Repetition. The rumor of ease.
Tenderness wasn't surrender. It was bait.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
Text me if you remember a thing I've forgotten to do. —Z
He thought that sentence was restraint. It was an opening.
Willow picked up the phone and considered all the ways help could look harmless. Something small. Believable. The kind of errand that plants a flag without looking like one.
Could use a charger. Left mine at the hospital, she typed. Then paused, added: If you're nearby. No rush.
Not a hook. A handhold.
The dots appeared, vanished, returned—proof that even Zane Reyes revised his impulses.
I'll bring one. 30 minutes.
A beat.
I'll get food. Thai?
She set the phone down and let a smile ghost across her mouth, thin and deliberate, a muscle trained to lie.
Step one, Plan A: repeat contact until "us" sounded like habit. Let proximity do what confession never could.
All she wanted now was an opportunity.
The lock clicked softly when she turned it, the spare key's place fresh in her mind. She opened the curtains wider, coaxed the room into a version of warmth that read on sight. Flowers to the sill. Cups rinsed and set within reach. A clean shape for a narrative to walk into.
The street below carried on—a courier on a bike; a woman tugging a stubborn dog; a car idling, then moving. Somewhere under that hum, the Maserati's restrained animal sound would return. She closed her eyes, inhaled jasmine and the faint ghost of his aftershave, and counted backward from ten until the anger cooled into something useful.
Something had shifted.
And she knew, with the cold precision of a strategist, that the best plans always began in moments that felt like tenderness.