Under Still Waters

The House of Quiet Waters was empty in the way only luxury could afford—no sound but for the hush of filtered air, the soft, aqueous burble of water cascading over stone. Marissa stood in the entrance and felt the warm humidity settle over her skin, thick and faintly mineral. She wondered if it was possible to become acclimated to perfection, or whether every visit would feel like the first, new and slightly unreal.

Erin stepped inside with Marissa, flip-flops leaving wet footprints on the black tile. Even after the months they’d spent together, the sight of Erin’s naked mint-green skin still triggered a tiny, private surprise. She never seemed to care, either for that or for her gravity-defying breasts, and Marissa envied the ferocity of it: the refusal to be tamed by embarrassment, or by anything else.

Katherine entered last, even though she was the one who had organized the meet-up. She drifted in, already naked (no other option), body radiating the kind of practiced composure that comes from years of living in public. If she felt strange about moving through the world without even the thinnest barrier between her and the gaze of others, she didn’t show it. Marissa watched as Katherine paused, head tilted at the soft lighting, then moved with intent toward the Kintsugi Pools, mouth in a little O of delight.

The air around the pools was hotter, alive with suspended mist. The pool at the far end steamed in the soft light, gold veining in the black basalt catching the light like threads of metal under water.

Katherine stepped to the edge, toes curled over the lip of the stone, then lowered herself in without hesitation, sinking to her collarbones in a single, gliding movement. She made no noise, but her eyes closed, mouth softening in a way that Marissa recognized as pleasure bordering on reverence. Katherine’s hair floated behind her, a velvet ribbon of black, and her body seemed to dissolve in the surface shimmer. For a long moment, she did not move, just existed in the way of a statue made for water.

Marissa watched, not for the first time, the effortless way Katherine claimed space and made it beautiful. She envied it, but also admired it, and suspected from their previous conversations that Katherine considered herself as much artifact as person now—a living sculpture, perfect and untouchable, and **** for sensation wherever she could feel it.

Erin waited, arms crossed beneath her breasts, at the edge of the next pool. She looked at the water as if considering a swim test in winter. Her body language—shoulders set, mouth in a hard line—spoke less of modesty and more of calculation. When she caught Marissa looking, she jerked her chin at the pool.

“You first,” she said.

Marissa smiled, stepped out of her robe, and slid into the water. It was hotter than she expected, a smooth, enveloping heat that radiated up her spine. She eased in slow, the way she did everything, letting her body measure and adjust to each new degree of temperature. When she was fully submerged, she glanced at Erin, who had not moved.

“Is it safe for you to be in hot water?” Marissa asked, pitching her voice just above the ambient hum.

Erin’s face cycled through three stages—annoyance, confusion, then a third one that Marissa couldn’t name. She stared at Marissa for a beat. “That’s actually a good question.”

Katherine, eyes open now, watched the two of them with an amused expression. She said nothing—could say nothing—but made a tiny, two-fingered gesture as if flicking a coin into a wishing well. Erin stared at her, then at the water. Her feet shuffled.

“Wait. Is this like a pregnancy risk?” Erin asked.

Marissa shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re not exactly human anymore. But it could matter.”

Erin turned the thought over, and Marissa could see her run the numbers behind her eyes. It was the same analytic squint she used when challenged in debate, or when a new transformation **** her to rewrite the day’s plan. For a second, Marissa thought Erin might opt out, or at least launch into a ten-minute review of the relevant obstetric research, but instead, she looked at Katherine.

Katherine raised both hands, palms out, and made an elaborate show of pulling in a deep breath, then exhaling slow, eyes lidded, as if to say: I am the living proof of what this place does and does not allow. She gestured to Erin’s belly, gave a thumbs-up sign, and beckoned her in with a smile.

Erin watched this, then barked a short laugh. “If it was dangerous, I guess there’d be a warning. Or the water would just not work for me.” She knelt, set both shoes by the pool’s edge, and slid into the water with a speed and confidence that belied her earlier hesitation.

Marissa let herself relax. The heat soaked into her bones and melted the tension in her back. Katherine drifted closer, hair trailing like ink behind her, eyes half-lidded in contentment. For a few minutes, nobody spoke. The only sound was the faint clink of water moving over gold lines, the hush of steam rising, and the distant rumble of pipes.

Erin was the first to break the silence. “It’s weird,” she said, her tone conversational, but there was a current underneath it. “I always pictured myself as the person least likely to end up in this situation. Pregnant. Twice.” She looked at her own belly, then at Marissa, then at Katherine. “I’m used to living in the red zone. Danger, risk, control. But now I have to plan for something I have literally zero instinct for.”

Marissa nodded. “What’s the scariest part?”

Erin considered. “All of it. I mean, I like the idea of family. I liked the idea of being a mom, a long time ago. But I figured I’d be the one calling the shots. Not… this.” She gestured at her chest, at her stomach. “Not having my entire body, my entire life, repurposed for something else.”

Marissa watched her, but let the silence stretch. Sometimes it helped people clarify themselves. Katherine did the same, her face a mask of supportive attention.

Erin went on. “I didn’t even get to choose. Although, I suppose it was asking for it, all that sex without protection, and the next thing I know, it’s my reality. I’m not saying I don’t want it now, just—” She trailed off, squinting at the steam. “I’m not used to being this… unprepared.”

Marissa watched the small tremor in Erin’s jaw. “You’re allowed to be unprepared. Even scared.”

Katherine, without breaking her gaze, floated a few inches closer to Erin and set her hand gently on Erin’s forearm. It was a simple, grounding gesture, but Erin stared at the place where the hand made contact, as if surprised by the sensation.

“I know,” Erin said. She didn’t pull away, just left her arm where it was. “It helps that the others are going through it too. Even if I can’t talk to them the way I want. Chloe’s so nervous, she can’t even say the word pregnant out loud.”

Marissa smiled at that, the image of Chloe’s round face flushing at any mention of sex. “She’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” Erin said. “They all will.” She looked at Marissa, eyes a little sharper now. “What about you?”

It was not a question Marissa had expected, but it was the reason she’d suggested this meeting. She felt the question before she answered it: a low pulse of doubt, then a longer, steadier wave of resignation. “I don’t know,” she said. “I spent most of my adult life convincing myself it was a question for the future. Something I’d open when I was ready.”

Erin grinned, crooked. “Like an emotional time capsule?”

“Exactly.” Marissa smiled back. “I kept telling myself that if I ever got the right partner, the right life, the right set of circumstances, I’d take the leap. But I was good at not examining what was inside the box.”

Katherine listened, her face open, head tilted to the side in a way that communicated infinite patience.

Marissa hesitated, then said, “Being here has made it feel more urgent. Not just because of Andy, or the Hotel, but because I see the way Chloe and Claire and you are changing. How it’s not theoretical for any of you anymore. It’s real.” She shrugged, a tiny gesture. “Now, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I deferred it because I was afraid I’d be bad at it. Or that I wouldn’t really want it, if I ever had the choice.”

Erin stared at her, then nodded, not in agreement but in understanding. “I get that. A hundred percent.”

The water lapped at their skin, steam drifting upward in soft clouds. Nobody spoke for a bit. Marissa felt the strange, electric quiet that always followed moments of honesty—raw, almost awkward, but never unpleasant.

Katherine reached over and, very gently, placed her hand over Marissa’s. Her fingers were long, elegant, and her grip was both light and certain. She didn’t squeeze, just rested there. Marissa looked down at the hand, then at Katherine’s face, and saw in it a silent message of solidarity. There was no need for words, no need for logic or argument. It was just a fact in the room, the way a stone is a fact in a river.

The three of them stayed there, hands and arms linked by heat and surface tension, until the water cooled and the noise of the world slowly returned at the edges.

Katherine’s palm on Marissa’s hand was warm, but not insistent. Marissa felt the tiny adjustments of Katherine’s fingers—first a careful pressure, then a feathering at her wrist that made the gesture feel equal parts comfort and invitation. She wondered if, for Katherine, touch was a language she’d long ago mastered. It certainly felt that way now: nothing wasted, every motion deliberate.

She looked at Erin, at the way Erin’s jaw had unclenched, at the color blooming high on her cheeks. Marissa hadn’t seen her this relaxed, not since the first weeks of the Hotel, before the competition had sharpened all of them into their current selves. Or maybe not relaxed; she looked ready, instead, for whatever came next.

Katherine tilted her head, a familiar ask, and then, with one palm still resting on Marissa, reached her other hand across the gap to Erin’s arm. The three of them made a chain, awkward at first and then… not. Katherine’s face was steady, but her lips parted, her throat working.

Marissa realized that this was the moment: the one she’d always looked for in therapy, when a client waded into the gap between what they said and what they truly wanted. This time, she was the one on the couch, and the realization made her suddenly shy.

Katherine, silent but expressive, drew a slow breath and gave a look that, even without voice, landed with perfect clarity: your turn. Erin’s eyebrows made a show of arching, and then she laughed, a hoarse, little-used sound. “You want a confession?” she said. “I’ll give you one. I’m scared of fucking it up. Not the pregnancy, but the part after. I never had a mom worth a damn, and my dad was…” She left it hanging, useless to finish. “So how do you not fuck that up, when you have no blueprint?”

Katherine lifted both hands, then gestured at herself—an entire body, offered up as evidence. She then pointed at Marissa, at Erin, an exaggerated sweep, and let her hair swirl on the water like a dark current.

Marissa caught the implication. “You can make a new blueprint,” she said, voice softer than she expected. “That’s what everyone here is doing, right?” She felt the urge to apologize for the cliché, then decided against it.

Katherine nodded, then pulled her hand from Erin’s arm and pointed at her own chest, then at Marissa, and then mimed cradling something—a baby, maybe, or a hope. There was a flicker there, an old memory, and Marissa thought she saw the edge of pain before Katherine smoothed it away. Katherine gave a small, tilted smile, then shrugged, as if to say: it’s not that complicated.

Erin watched the gestures, her frown replaced by a kind of wonder. “Did you ever have kids?” she said, the words too blunt to be rhetorical.

Katherine went very still. Not the careful stillness of someone composing themselves, but the kind that arrives before the body knows what to do. Then she nodded, once, and held up one finger.

Marissa felt the shift in the water around them.

Katherine’s hand moved to her own chest, then dropped to hover at roughly hip height—the height of a small child, maybe three years old. She held it there for a moment, then let her hand fall to the surface of the water and spread her fingers flat, watching them.

“How old?” Marissa said, keeping her voice even.

Katherine lifted three fingers.

Nobody spoke. Erin had gone very quiet beside her, the earlier color draining from her cheeks. Katherine’s expression had not broken—she was still present, still composed—but something behind her eyes had receded to a great distance, the way a light looks smaller when it’s moving away from you rather than going out.

She touched her own wrist, then mimed the motion of being pulled—not violently, but with the finality of a tide. Her eyes moved to the middle distance, then back to Erin, then to Marissa.

Marissa thought of the painting. Of the frame. Of everything Katherine had been folded into and could not leave.

“They don’t know where you are,” Marissa said. It wasn’t a question.

Katherine shook her head slowly. Then she pressed two fingers to her sternum and held them there, and Marissa understood that this was not grief being performed for their benefit. It was grief that had been living in that exact spot for a very long time, quiet and load-bearing as a wall.

Erin reached across the water and took Katherine’s hand. Katherine looked down at it, then up at Erin, and something in her face shifted—not relief, exactly, but recognition. The acknowledgment of a debt that could not be repaid but was being witnessed anyway.

The steam rose around them. Nobody moved to break the chain.

Claire slipped into the Sky Archive just after sunrise, the chill of the spiral staircase bracing her into full alertness. No hint of movement from the ground floor, no echo of a Mildred anywhere—just the soft pop of ozone where the passage met the Archive threshold, and then silence.

She paused at the doorway to inhale, not out of breath but out of habit. The Archive at this hour was a kind of negative space: floors of thick glass, catwalks and spiral staircases hanging in air, all shot through with the blue-black of the volcano outside. The place made even Claire, who prided herself on not being easily awed, feel smaller than she remembered being as a child. A cathedral built from diamond, yes, but warmer, clearer; the kind of church that expected you to understand it or leave.

She went to her usual table—a large slab of wood set near the center, with a direct line of sight to the east-facing wall, perfect for watching the shifting angle of light—and opened her notebook, pulled out a mechanical pencil, and an inkwell with a quill so sharp it could be a weapon. The hotel provided excellent pens, but Claire had always preferred the precision of a graphite point. She liked the friction, the need to press hard.

She did not waste time with contemplation, not now. The Sky Archive was at its best in the hour after sunrise, when even the glass seemed to have a memory of night. The rules here were simple: any book in the world (or in a world) could be called for, but it required knowing what you wanted, and asking with precision. Vague queries would give you the Index—a ceiling-height, rolling rack of cards that must be navigated manually, cross-referenced and double-checked until the correct location surfaced, or didn’t.

Claire stood, moved to the Index, and began. Her hands moved with the nervous, birdlike speed that Andy once called “microdosing adrenaline,” but today it was just adrenaline, full strength. The cards were hand-typed, sometimes hand-written, sometimes a language she didn’t recognize—cuneiform, Farsi, a mutant Latin. She started with the languages she did know.

She searched for keywords, each time writing the terms she tried in the notebook: Underworld, Debt, Seven Gates, Law, Ereshkigal, Blood, Marriage, Substitution, Kin, Finality, Sacrifice. Some returned nothing. Some returned a string of locations that corresponded to different parts of the Archive, cross-listed with a logic that would have stumped anyone who hadn’t spent hundreds of hours mapping the Archive’s logic.

It took her fifteen minutes to find the first relevant volume, tucked into a shelf so high she had to use the rolling ladder. It was ancient, bound in faded blue leather with a gold mesh spine, the title transliterated as “Lex Sacramentum.” The inside cover page was soft as tissue, the ink bled slightly into the margin from a century of humidity. She took it back to her table and opened to the chapter titled “Rules of Exchange: Living for the Dead.”

The prose was dense, even by ancient legal standards. She read with the efficiency of someone who’d taught herself Sanskrit at thirteen. After an hour, she had a page of notes, and most of a diagram reconstructing the requirements for “binding debts and their permitted sureties.” The debt could only be paid by someone of kin, by blood or by marriage, and the act must be performed with full knowledge and intent. More, the law was recursive: to substitute for a debt already substituted was not just forbidden, but “invoked great calamity upon the lineages of all involved.” She underlined that twice. There was a warning about hosts, and something about “the audience” (unclear whether that meant observers or the cosmic Audience), but the grammar became fragmented.

Claire worked for another hour, finding nothing more helpful until the Archive itself intervened.

At 7:24 AM, a volume three times the size of the “Lex Sacramentum” landed on her table without visible intervention. Its spine read “Annals of Transfer and Substitution: A Casebook.” It was mostly in legal German, with side notes in English and French and, incongruously, several marginalia in a childlike print that could only be the writing of a prior Contestant. She scanned the index, flipped to a case titled “The Scholar’s Dilemma, 1923,” and read the summary with a growing chill.

It recounted the tale of a woman, identified as a “candidate,” whose **** was paid by her sister. The substitution was “successful,” but it had to be witnessed and affirmed by the debt collector. There were no appeals; the cost was final, the debt fully paid. Claire scanned for loopholes, found none. She scribbled a summary in her notebook, labeling it CASE 1.

She found two more cases. The second, “The Host’s Undoing, 1955,” detailed an attempt to game the law by having a Contestant fake her willingness, in the hope of a last-minute rescue. It failed. The debt collector voided the payment and called for the original sacrifice instead, who was, at that point, unreachable. The result was not the sparing of both lives, but the loss of both: the world consumed the price, and left nothing behind. Claire wrote this up as CASE 2.

The third case was stranger. The entry began with a description of the problem—the attempted substitution of a Host for a debtee, intended to break the cycle entirely and shut down the entire system. The narrative became increasingly frantic, the legalese devolving into annotations and angry, almost ****, notes. The final sentence read: “The attempt initiated, but result is unrecorded. The scribe was replaced at this point. Further information classified under Producer Directive 19.” The page after was blank.

Claire stared at the blank page for a long time. The vacuum of information there was as precise and engineered as the rest of the Archive.

She wrote down CASE 3 with a question mark, then a row of three exclamation points. She underlined it twice.

She sat back, stared through the etched glass at the world outside, and replayed her research in her head. If the law was to be believed (and she knew, from experience, that the law in this place was rarely interested in being outsmarted), then the only way to break the chain was to find a new precedent, a “void” in the logic that no one had thought to fill.

Claire was frightened. Not in the existential, why-are-we-here sense, but in the clear, cold way of someone who has just found out their building is fireproof but the fire itself is still coming, and will be there on schedule.

She wrote out her findings in the notebook, every clause precise, every citation recorded.

She closed the notebook, pressed her palms flat against the table, and tried to imagine what came next. The glass beneath her hands was warm, as if the Archive itself approved of her work.

It was not a comfort.

The light came through the Archive’s windows in slow, creeping arcs, the promise of morning unspooling across the floor. Claire watched the line of sun as it passed her shoes, then her calves, then the edge of her table. She listened to the faint click of the ventilation and waited for the sense of purpose to return.

It did not.

Sam had learned, over the last few days, that the Watchtower transformation didn’t always work like a fire alarm. Sometimes it was a subtle prickling at the base of her skull, a shift in air pressure, or a brief sense of wrongness in the world, as if a streetlight in your old neighborhood burned the wrong color for a moment. Sometimes it was a screaming klaxon, an all-hands-on-deck, something-is-bleeding panic that jerked her upright no matter what she was doing.

This one was a little of both. She’d been walking the perimeter trail, a loop through the hotel’s less-manicured grounds, sometime in the middle of the morning. She felt the Watchtower stir—nothing dramatic, just a distant, cold finger tracing the top of her spine. At first she ignored it, thinking it was leftover from the night before. But it didn’t fade. It sharpened instead, narrowing its focus, and soon Sam had the distinct, bone-deep knowledge that somewhere close by, Riley was in distress.

She picked up her pace. The path cut through a stretch of dense undergrowth, and then opened into a clearing, one that Sam had never noticed before despite walking these trails dozens of times. At the center of the clearing was a low, square structure: brick walls, battered wood door, a small, clouded window set high in the wall. The door had a rusted number “1” above the lintel, out of step with the resort’s entire aesthetic.

The Watchtower transformation buzzed hotter as she approached. There was no question now; this was where she needed to be. She raised a fist, rapped gently on the wood. No answer. She waited a moment, then called, “Hey, you in there? Riley?” Still nothing, but the sense of urgency in her neck didn’t fade. Sam put her hand on the knob. It turned.

Inside, the air was several degrees cooler. There was almost no furniture—just a battered wooden cradle, a few low shelves, and a narrow desk tucked under the window. A mass of pillows was thrown in a corner. The wallpaper, peeling in places, was painted in faint bands of pastel pink and yellow. Most of the shelves were empty, but one had a small herd of wooden animals and a jumble of stuffed toys.

Riley sat on the floor in the patch of sunlight beneath the window. Her back was to the door, knees drawn up to her chest, arms spread out with hands pressed flat to the floor. Her hair was loose and wild, the left side of her face in shadow, the right washed out by the light. There were tear tracks visible on her cheek and the sleeve of her jacket was wet near the wrist. She didn’t look up.

Sam hesitated in the doorway, then closed it gently behind her. “You want company?” she asked, quietly.

Riley didn’t answer right away. She just sat, fingers splayed on the wooden planks, her body perfectly still. Eventually, she said, voice hoarse, “If you’re here, then you’re probably the right company.”

Sam crossed the room, careful not to step on any of the scattered toys. She sat down beside Riley, not too close, but not leaving much air between them. She matched Riley’s posture: knees up, hands planted on either side. The stone floor sent a chill up her thighs. She let the silence stretch, not rushing to fill it.

After a while, Riley said, “How did you know?”

Sam shrugged. “Your name lit up on my internal scoreboard.” She tapped her temple. “Gift from Arabella. Tells me when people I care about are in distress. Like an anxiety smoke detector.”

That got a flicker of a smile out of Riley, though she didn’t look over. “You ever wish you could turn it off?”

Sam thought about it. “Only if I’m trying to nap.”

Another silence. Sam let her eyes wander the room. The baby cradle looked handmade, the finish uneven, the wood soft and worn. There was a faded green quilt folded on the rail, just visible in the gloom. The only sign of technology was a single, unlit lamp on the desk by the window.

“I don’t think I was ever meant to be in a place like this,” Riley said, her voice ragged at the edges. “A nursery, I mean. Or anywhere that tries to make grief into a color scheme.”

Sam said nothing. She recognized the mood, recognized the flavor of what was happening here. Some wounds didn’t heal—they just found new places to hurt.

Riley’s hands flexed against the floor. “I had a son once. John. He died after a day.” She let the words land, then added, “Nobody talks about it. Not in the real world, not with me, not ever. I wasn’t allowed to grieve. The family said, ‘He’s an angel now. You’ll see him in heaven.’ That’s not closure, it’s a threat.” She laughed, a short, cutting sound. “I didn’t get to cry about it until I got here. Until I told Chloe. Then Andy. And then everyone knew.”

Sam waited until Riley’s breath steadied a bit. “I’m sorry,” she said, softly.

Riley shrugged. “I’m not looking for sorry. I just don’t want it to be a secret.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “For a while, I thought the worst part was that he never had a voice. Nobody remembers a dead baby except the mother, and eventually the mother has to forget or else the world stops working.”

Sam shook her head. “That’s not true. The world’s already not working.”

Riley almost laughed, but not quite. “The point is… I don’t know what to do with the grief. The nursery’s the only place I found where it didn’t feel like trespassing. At least here, it’s not alone.”

Sam looked around. The room was haunted, not in a literal sense but in the way of a memory that refused to evaporate. She picked up a small wooden duck from the nearest shelf, turned it over in her hand, then set it down.

After a while, Sam said, “You want to know a secret?”

Riley didn’t answer, but her head turned slightly.

“I always assumed I’d be a terrible parent,” Sam said. “My family’s a mess, I’m a mess, I barely kept a cactus alive in college. I never seriously thought about it until I got here.”

She watched for a reaction, saw Riley’s lips curl at the corner.

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” Riley asked.

Sam shrugged. “Not really. It’s just true.”

They sat like that for a while: the two of them, in the only un-curated room in the whole damn place, surrounded by dust and sunlight and the ghosts of things that never got to be real.

Riley picked up a toy—one of those ancient Fisher-Price telephones, the kind with eyes that wiggle—and set it between her knees. “Chloe wonders about the diary,” she said, voice softer. “We couldn’t open it. She just wanted to know whose it was.”

Sam looked at the window. “Did you find out?”

Riley nodded, her eyes on the phone. “Yeah. The name on the front is Sarah W. There’s a W, and then a blank, like the rest of the name didn’t matter.”

Sam let the silence fill up, not moving to answer. Sometimes it was better to let a question sit in the air.

After a minute, Riley turned the toy phone over, then back again. “You ever think about having kids?”

Sam barked a laugh. “Never made it past the abstract. If you’d asked me last year, I’d have told you it was a hard no. But then Shar made me and Liesa a potion. I have it in my closet, hidden in a shoe box like I’m twelve and it’s weed. If we drink it, we can get each other pregnant. Both of us, possibly at the same time, like some kind of genetic relay race.”

Riley’s eyes actually widened at that. “You’re joking.”

Sam grinned, shook her head. “Nope. It’s real. But now that I have it, I don’t know what to do with it. I’m terrified, honestly. Never thought I’d get to be that kind of scared.” She looked down at her hands, then back at Riley. “I never told anyone, except now you. I don’t know what kind of mom I’d be. If I’d want to be.”

Riley was quiet for a long moment. Then, very softly: “You’d be a better mom than you think.” She took a breath, then added, “Liesa would make it look easy, but you’d be the one who gets up when the baby’s screaming at 3 AM.”

Sam laughed. “Only because I never sleep anyway.”

Riley smiled, this time for real. “You’re allowed to wait,” she said. “You don’t have to decide now.”

Sam said nothing. For a while, they both looked at the diary on the desk, the single blue book tied shut with ribbon. It was faded, unlabeled, but it felt heavier than the rest of the room.

“I always wonder,” Riley said, “if the woman who made this room ever got to hold her child.”

Sam nodded. “I know what you mean.” And she did. There was a strange, soft sorrow imbued in the nursery, and Sam feared the answer to that question was no.

Riley’s hands curled into fists, then relaxed. She let herself lean sideways, head tipped to rest briefly on Sam’s shoulder. Sam stayed still, letting the contact last as long as Riley needed it. The weight of Riley’s hair was damp and heavy, the scent of salt and tears and old dust.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

Eventually, Riley straightened. “Thanks,” she said, not looking over.

“Anytime,” Sam answered.

They stood in slow unison, both joints creaking in protest. Sam let Riley take the lead, following her out the door and into the light. Outside, the world was still wet and cold, but less so than before. Riley stopped just outside the threshold, shaded her eyes against the morning, and looked up.

“Let’s get coffee,” she said.

Sam grinned. “Now you’re talking.”

They walked back to the main path together, not talking, but each feeling a little less alone than they had when the morning started.