Chapter 9 #2
He’d saved them all. Every poem, every joke, every late-night confession wrapped in code.
She’d spent four days being Randall’s filing cabinet—a brain to fill, a tool to use—and she’d started to forget she’d ever been anything else.
But Lincoln had proof. Lincoln had records.
She’d been real to someone before the warehouse.
She’d been real to Binary.
The tears she’d been holding back spilled over, hot tracks running down her cheeks. She didn’t attempt to stop them. Didn’t have the strength left to try.
“You existed before the warehouse,” Lincoln said. His voice was still careful, still measured, but there was something underneath it now—something raw. “You were real before any of this happened. Our conversations were real. I have the records to prove it.”
She was crying in earnest now, days of terror and exhaustion and grief pouring out of her in ragged sobs. It was the first time she’d really cried since the rescue—the first time she’d felt safe enough to fall apart.
Lincoln sat very still beside her for a moment, hands folded in his lap, clearly unsure what to do with her tears. Then, slowly, like he was solving a problem he’d never encountered before, he reached out and took her hand.
His fingers were warm. Steady. He didn’t squeeze too hard or pull her toward him—just held on, an anchor in the storm of her grief.
He wasn’t performing comfort. He wasn’t following a script.
He was just there, present and uncertain and trying, his thumb tracing a single careful line across her knuckles.
When the sobs finally began to subside, Morgan took a shuddering breath and heard herself speak.
“Your code is inefficient. Line 347 could be compressed.” She kept going, the words flowing out of her with perfect clarity.
“Not everything is about efficiency. Explain. It’s a sonnet.
Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line.
Stay safe stranger. Sometimes beauty IS the function. Dot dot dot. Interesting.”
She recited the entire exchange—every line, every pause, every piece of punctuation—exactly as it had appeared on her screen two years ago.
Lincoln had gone very still.
“You—” He stopped. She could almost hear his brain recalibrating, reassessing. “Did you memorize all of our conversations?”
Oh no. He thought this was just about them. That she was some sort of desperate stalker. “No. It’s not—I’m not a stalker, I promise. I memorize everything.”
“What do you mean?”
The familiar dread curled in Morgan’s stomach. This was the part where people pulled away. Where they looked at her differently, like she was something strange and unsettling instead of just a person with an unusual brain.
She kept her eyes on her knees, unable to look at him.
“I just—I can’t forget things. Anything.
I read something once, hear something once, and it’s in my brain forever.
Every conversation we’ve ever had, every book I’ve ever read, every face I’ve ever seen.
” She swallowed hard. “It’s called eidetic memory. I’ve had it my whole life.”
The silence stretched between them. Morgan braced herself for the shift—the subtle withdrawal, the careful distance that always came when people realized what she was.
“That’s remarkable,” Lincoln said.
She looked up. His expression hadn’t changed. No wariness. No unease. Just that same focused attention, now tinged with something that looked almost like wonder.
“It’s not. Most people find it unsettling.”
He shrugged. “Most people find me unsettling.” He tilted his head slightly, considering. “Your brain processes and retains information with perfect fidelity. That’s not unsettling. That’s efficient.”
A laugh escaped her—watery and broken, but real. “Only you would call my freakish memory efficient.”
“It’s not freakish. It’s extraordinary.” He said it like he was stating a fact, like there was no other possible interpretation. “You’re extraordinary.”
Morgan didn’t know what to say to that. Nobody had ever called her extraordinary before. Strange, yes. Unsettling, definitely. But not extraordinary. Not like it was something to admire instead of something to fear.
“Fair warning,” she said, her voice still thick with tears.
“I can also tell you that the third book on the second shelf in this room is missing its dust jacket, and there are exactly seventeen ceiling tiles, and you have a small scar on your left hand that you got sometime before we met because I noticed it the first time you brought me soup.”
She hadn’t meant to say it. The words just fell out—her version of deflection, pointing at her own strangeness before anyone else could.
Lincoln glanced at his hand. “I was twelve. Soldering iron.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I know. I wanted to.”
The tears started again—different this time, softer. Lincoln made a small, uncertain sound, and then his hand was on her shoulder. The touch was gentle, tentative, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
Morgan leaned into him before she could think better of it.
He froze. For one terrible second, she thought she’d made a mistake, crossed some line he hadn’t meant to offer. But then his arms came around her, slowly, carefully, adjusting until she was tucked against his chest.
The awkwardness faded almost immediately.
He held her like she was something precious, something that mattered, his arms stronger than she’d expected and his heartbeat fast against her ear.
He was nervous—she could feel it in the rapid pulse, the slight tension in his shoulders—but the tenderness was real. It wasn’t performance.
He smelled like coffee—dark roast, slightly burned, probably his third cup—and something clean. Unscented detergent. The particular absence of artificial fragrance. Ordinary smells. Safe smells. Morgan pressed her face into his shirt and let herself be held.
The shaking finally began to subside.
They stayed like that for a long time, neither of them sure how to disengage. Morgan could feel the rise and fall of Lincoln’s breathing, steady now, and the warmth of him seeping into her bones.
“In the box,” she whispered into his chest, “when it was dark and I couldn’t move and I didn’t know if anyone was ever coming—I recited our conversations. All of them. In order.” Her fingers tightened on his shirt. “You were the only thing that felt real.”
Lincoln’s arms tightened around her, just slightly.
“I thought you were gone for good,” he said, his voice rough. “When you didn’t respond. That you were done with…what we had.” He stopped. Swallowed. “I was going to delete everything. Our conversations. The forum. All of it. I had my hands on the keyboard when your message came through.”
Morgan let the weight of that settle over her.
He’d been ready to delete everything. A few seconds earlier, and her message would have vanished into nothing.
She’d still be in the warehouse. Still be in the box.
Still be Randall’s filing cabinet, bleeding and memorizing data she didn’t understand, while no one came.
The thought made her chest tight. Not anger—she couldn’t be angry at him for almost giving up when she’d given him nothing but silence. Just the cold awareness of how thin the margin had been. How close she’d come to disappearing forever.
“A few seconds,” she whispered. “If you’d deleted it a few seconds earlier—”
“I didn’t.” His arms tightened around her more. “I saw it. I came.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
There was a long silence between them. Not uncomfortable, but like they both didn’t know quite what else to say.
“You need to sleep,” he finally said.
“I know.”
“Real sleep. You haven’t slept properly since you got here.”
It wasn’t a question. He’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed.
Morgan looked at the covers—the ones she hadn’t been able to bring herself to climb under, because being surrounded felt too much like being enclosed.
“Would you—” She stopped. Started again. “Do you think you could stay? Just for—I mean, you don’t have to, but—”
“Statistically,” he said slowly, “having someone present reduces nightmare recurrence.”
“Is that a yes?”
Lincoln stood, and for a moment, she thought he was still leaving. Instead, he moved around to the other side of the bed and lay down beside her.
He was stiff at first, uncertain, like he wasn’t sure where his limbs were supposed to go. But when she curled into him—her head on his chest, her hand fisted in his shirt—he adjusted. Slowly. Carefully. His arm came around her, and she felt him exhale.
“This is outside my area of expertise,” he said quietly.
“Mine too.”
Yet somehow, it worked.
Morgan closed her eyes and listened to the steady rhythm of Lincoln’s heartbeat. Binary had come for her. He’d decoded her message and driven through the night and pulled her out of hell.
But it was Lincoln’s arms around her now. Lincoln’s warmth seeping into her bones. Lincoln’s voice, rough and certain, saying I saw it. I came.
For the first time in days, the darkness behind her lids didn’t feel like a threat.
It felt like rest.