Chapter 15
Seven months ago:
Mercury: Do you ever wish you could turn your brain off?
Binary: Frequently. It doesn’t have that function.
Mercury: What do you do instead?
Binary: I solve problems until exhaustion forces a shutdown.
Mercury: That sounds lonely.
Binary: It’s efficient. Loneliness is just an unoptimized variable.
Mercury: Sometimes I think you believe that. And sometimes I think you’re lying to both of us.
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. The bedside lamp cast a warm circle of light that didn’t reach the corners of the room. Outside, the Wyoming darkness had settled over the area like a held breath.
She was trying to remember the color of Ms. Delacroix’s eyes.
They were brown. She knew they were brown.
She’d looked into those eyes a thousand times—across library tables, over cups of tea, through the blur of tears when she’d needed someone and Ms. Delacroix had been there.
Brown eyes. Warm eyes. The first person—besides Lincoln—who’d ever looked at her like she was more than her memory.
But what shade of brown?
Morgan summoned the image the way she’d always summoned images—expecting it to be there, waiting, preserved in the amber of perfect recall. Instead, she found only the word. Brown. Generic. A label instead of a memory. Like someone had taken a photograph and replaced it with a description.
The particular warmth of those eyes. The way they’d crinkled at the corners when Ms. Delacroix smiled. The exact depth of color, somewhere between coffee and honey, that had made Morgan feel seen for the first time in her life.
Gone.
She pressed her hands against her face and felt herself start to shake.
She was losing Ms. Delacroix. Piece by piece, detail by detail, she was losing the only person who had ever loved her.
And she couldn’t tell anyone, because how did you explain that your own mind was betraying you?
How did you put into words the particular horror of summoning a memory and finding it hollow?
For twenty-eight years, her memory had been the one constant. Foster homes changed. People left. But her mind stayed—perfect, reliable, hers. It was the foundation everything else was built on. The thing that made her valuable, made her useful, made her her.
And now it was being crowded out by coordinates and military codes and the endless flood of data Randall had poured into her skull.
She was disappearing inside her own head.
Morgan stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. Her legs carried her to the window without her permission, then back to the bed, then to the door—not to leave, just to touch it, to feel the wood grain under her fingertips, something real and solid and external.
What else had she lost?
She grabbed for other memories, frantic now. Her first foster home—the wallpaper in her bedroom, the pattern of faded roses. It came, but slowly. Too slowly. Was it roses or peonies? Had there been a border at the top, or was she inventing that?
The library in Whitefish. The exact position of her desk. The way the afternoon light fell across the returns cart at three p.m. in October. She could see it, but the edges had softened. Like looking at something through a window that needed cleaning.
How much had she already lost without noticing?
Her breath was coming too fast. She pressed her hand flat against her sternum, trying to slow it down, but her heart hammered against her palm like it was trying to escape. The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago. The walls closer.
This is what Randall did to me. He didn’t just put data in—he pushed everything else out.
She was crying. She hadn’t noticed when it started, but tears were streaming down her face now, hot and unstoppable. She swiped at them with the back of her hand, and they just kept coming.
A knock at the door caused her to jump.
Shit. She had to pull herself together. She couldn’t let Lincoln see her like this. She dropped her hands. Wiped her face. Arranged her expression into something that might pass for composed.
“Come in.”
The door opened slowly, and Lincoln stood in the gap. His posture was stiff, his shoulders rigid with an awkwardness she’d learned to recognize.
He’d rehearsed whatever he was about to say. She could see it in the careful blankness of his expression, the way he was holding himself apart.
Whatever it was, she hated that she’d forced him to do that.
“I need to apologize,” he said.
She stared at him. “For what?”
“The cliff. The kiss.” He stepped into the room but stayed near the door, keeping distance between them. “I shouldn’t have let that happen. You’re in a vulnerable state, and I took advantage of that, and I’ve clearly made you uncomfortable because today, you could barely look at me.”
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Took a breath. Tried to process what he was saying through the fog of her own spiral.
“You’ve been pushing yourself to exhaustion,” he continued, the words coming out stilted and over-practiced.
“You snap when I try to help. You avoid eye contact. The logical conclusion is that my behavior at the cliff crossed a line, and you’ve been trying to create distance ever since.
I wanted you to know that I understand now, and it won’t happen again. ”
He’d misread everything.
All day, watching her spiral, watching her push harder and harder until she couldn’t see straight—he’d thought she was avoiding him.
That the manic energy, the snapping, the inability to stop working long enough to breathe—all of it was about the kiss.
About regretting what they’d shared at the bottom of that cliff.
She could let him believe it.
Let him think she regretted the kiss. Let him keep his distance. It would be easier than explaining the truth—easier than admitting that she was losing pieces of herself and didn’t know how to stop it.
But she looked at his face. The strong line of his jaw, tight with tension. The dark eyes that tracked data faster than anyone she’d ever met, now fixed on her with something that looked like bracing for impact. The rigid posture, the careful blankness that she now recognized as hurt.
He’d spent two days thinking he’d done something wrong, and he was standing here apologizing for the first moment of real connection she’d felt since the warehouse.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let him go on thinking that, even if she didn’t know how to explain what was really happening.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lincoln’s expression flickered. “Then why—”
“Because I’m scared.” The words cracked open before she could hold them back. “Not of you. Of something else. Something I can’t—” She stopped. Shook her head. “I can’t explain it right now.”
He didn’t push. Didn’t demand clarification or logical justification. Just stood there, waiting, watching her with that focused attention that had always made her feel seen.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper. “I just want to stop thinking. For one night, I want my brain to shut up.”
Lincoln stayed in the doorway. Uncertain. She could see him processing, calculating, trying to figure out the correct response to a situation that had no clear protocol.
She knew what she wanted.
“Can you help me with that?” she asked.
She watched his throat move as he swallowed. Watched the uncertainty give way to something else—something that looked almost like hope.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
Morgan crossed the room.
She kissed him before he could overthink it. Different from the cliff—not tentative, not accidental. Deliberate. Urgent. Seeking something she couldn’t name but needed desperately to find.
His hands came up to her waist, tentative at first, fingers barely grazing the fabric of her shirt. Then she pressed closer and his arms tightened, pulling her against him with a certainty that sent heat spreading through her belly.
She needed this. Needed to feel something other than the terror of losing herself. Needed to be in her body instead of trapped in her failing mind.
Lincoln let her lead. Followed her cues with the same focus he brought to code—reading her responses, adjusting, adapting.
When she deepened the kiss, he matched her.
When her fingers found the hem of his shirt, his breath caught but he didn’t pull away.
When she stepped backward toward the bed, he followed.
His shirt came off first. She pulled it over his head and let her hands explore the planes of his chest—more muscular than she’d expected, warm skin over firm muscle, a scattering of hair that roughened beneath her palms. He shivered when her fingers traced down his ribs, and she filed that away.
A map she was learning. A language that had nothing to do with code.
His hands found the buttons of her blouse. He paused there, fingers hovering.
“Is this okay?” His voice had gone rough. “Tell me if—”
“Don’t stop.” She pulled him closer. “Please don’t stop.”
He undid the buttons slowly, and she helped him, shrugging the fabric off her shoulders and letting it fall. The air was cool against her bare skin, but his mouth was warm, tracing a path from her neck to her collarbone to the hollow of her throat where her pulse hammered against her skin.
They fell onto the bed together, a tangle of limbs and half-removed clothing and the particular awkwardness of two people still learning each other’s bodies.
His knee pressed between her thighs, and she gasped, pulling him closer, wanting the weight of him.
Wanting to feel grounded in something physical and present and now.