Chapter 20
Five months ago:
Mercury: What’s the worst code you’ve ever written?
Binary: Define worst.
Mercury: The kind you’d be embarrassed for anyone to see.
Binary: I don’t experience embarrassment about code.
Mercury: Liar.
Binary: There may be a nested loop from 2015 that haunts me.
Mercury: Tell me everything.
Binary: Absolutely not.
The Wyoming landscape had been scrolling past for hours, endless stretches of grassland giving way to foothills that grew steeper with every mile. Morgan shifted in the passenger seat and let her gaze drift to the back of Lincoln’s SUV.
Cases. That was the first thing she’d noticed when they’d loaded the vehicle—black cases of equipment she didn’t fully recognize.
Electronics, scanners, devices with blinking lights and purposes she could only guess at.
And beneath them, in a locked compartment Lincoln had opened with a biometric scan, weapons.
More than she’d expected. Enough to make her stomach drop.
He’d prepared for this like a military operation.
Two days ago, that might have surprised her. Now she watched his hands on the steering wheel—steady, precise, the same hands that had touched her so carefully—and had to look away before he caught her staring.
The man who built fortresses and wrote code also rappelled down cliffs and packed weapons like he knew how to use them. Linear Tactical, he’d mentioned the day they went rappelling. She was beginning to understand what that meant.
But more than any of that was the fact that he was doing all of this for her. Risking his safety, his anonymity, his carefully controlled world. For letters. For pieces of paper.
Although, to her, they were more than that. They were proof that she’d been loved. And if she was going to lose that clarity in her mind, she desperately wanted to have the letters in her possession so she could remind herself.
And Lincoln, impossibly, had understood that. All the equipment in the back of the vehicle loudly announced he thought this was a dangerous idea, but he was still here, prepared to do it anyway.
His eyes moved to the rearview mirror, then the side mirror, then back to the road ahead. A constant rotation she’d been watching for miles. He drove exactly the speed limit—not a mile over, not a mile under—his body tight with a tension she could feel radiating across the console between them.
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t look at her. “Define okay.”
“You’re quiet.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “This is outside my comfort zone. All of it.”
Morgan waited. She’d learned that with Lincoln, silence often drew out more than questions. Not forcing him to talk, instead letting him continue at his own pace.
“I’m not a recluse,” he continued after a moment.
“I see my family regularly. I exist in Oak Creek without significant difficulty—hang out with friends at the Eagle’s Nest like we did last night.
” His fingers flexed on the wheel. “But there are more variables once I’m out of my house.
And there are exponentially more variables for today’s situation. ”
Her apartment. Her life. Walking into a dangerous situation.
“I mapped three different routes,” Lincoln continued, pulling her back to the present. “Identified fallback positions along each one. Calculated response times for local law enforcement in case we need to avoid them.”
Morgan stared at him. “You did all that this morning?”
“I did it last night. After you fell back asleep.”
After she fell asleep. After he’d held her while she cried about losing pieces of herself. After everything.
He hadn’t slept. He’d planned. For her.
“Lincoln—” She didn’t know how to finish. Didn’t have words for what it meant to be the person someone lost sleep over. The person someone planned escape routes for.
“There’s also the possibility that Randall has people watching the roads into Whitefish,” he continued, apparently unaware of what he’d just handed her. “I’ve been monitoring traffic patterns behind us. So far, nothing suspicious, but the variables increase significantly once we enter Montana.”
“I could go alone.”
The words came out before she’d fully decided to say them. A reflex, maybe. The old instinct to protect people from the inconvenience of caring about her.
Lincoln’s head turned sharply. “What?”
“I could take a bus from the next town. Keep you out of danger.” She made herself hold his gaze. “You’ve already risked enough for me. You’re harboring a fugitive. If something happened because you were there—”
“No.” Not angry. Just certain. The same tone he used when stating mathematical facts. “That’s not an option.”
“Why not?”
He was quiet for a moment. His eyes returned to the road, but she could see something working behind them. Processing. Trying to translate whatever he was feeling into words.
“Because if something happened to you and I wasn’t there,” he said finally, “I would never be able to calculate the variables I missed. I would replay every decision, every route not taken, every moment I could have been present and wasn’t.” A pause. “It would destroy me.”
Morgan stopped breathing.
Not it would be unfortunate. Not I would feel responsible. It would destroy me. Like it was simply true. Like there was no other possible outcome.
She had to turn away, staring out the window at the passing trees until her eyes burned and she blinked hard against the sensation.
Then his hand found hers.
He laced their fingers together without looking away from the road, his grip warm and certain. Not asking…just taking. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Morgan held on. Let that be enough.
They drove in silence for a while. Not uncomfortable—just full. She watched the landscape shift outside her window, Wyoming fading into something else. The mountains growing closer. The trees changing.
Montana emerging.
“I lived there for six months when I was twelve.” Morgan pointed at a small town as they passed the exit sign. “The Gregorys. They had a dog named Buttercup who used to sleep on my bed.”
Lincoln glanced at the sign. “Why only six months?”
“Mr. Gregory got transferred for work. They couldn’t take me with them. That’s how it usually worked. Something would change—a job, a new baby, a relative who needed the spare room—and I’d get transferred to the next family.”
A rest stop appeared on the right. Morgan’s hands curled into fists in her lap.
“The Martinellis bought me ice cream there once. I was nine.” She could still see Mrs. Martinelli’s face—the careful patience, the way her smile had started to falter even then. “They kept me for almost a year. That was one of the longer placements.”
“What happened?”
Morgan watched the rest stop disappear in the side mirror.
“I corrected Mr. Martinelli at dinner. He was telling a story about something that happened at work, and he got a detail wrong. A date. I’d heard him tell the story on the phone earlier that week, so I knew the real date.
” She paused. “I thought I was being helpful.”
The silence stretched. She could feel Lincoln waiting.
“Mrs. Martinelli pulled me aside afterward. She wasn’t angry.
That was almost worse. She was just…tired.
She said, ‘Morgan, honey, sometimes people don’t want to be corrected.
Sometimes they just want to tell their story.
’” She dug her nails into her palms. “I didn’t understand.
The date was wrong. How could it not matter that the date was wrong? ”
“It mattered,” Lincoln said quietly. “Just not the way you thought.”
“Two weeks later, they requested a transfer. The caseworker said they felt overwhelmed by my needs.” Morgan released her fists, pressed her palms flat against her thighs. “That was the word that followed me. Overwhelming. Unsettling. Too much.”
She’d never told anyone that story. Not even Ms. Delacroix, who’d heard most of the others. It sat in her memory like a splinter—the moment she’d first understood that being right wasn’t the same as being wanted.
Except now, when she reached for the details, they came slower than they should have. The kitchen where the conversation happened—had the wallpaper been yellow or cream?
She’d known once.
“How many homes total?” Lincoln asked.
“Twelve. From age eight to eighteen.” She watched another mile marker pass. “It wasn’t tragic. I know that’s what people expect when they hear foster care—horror stories, abuse, something dramatic. But it wasn’t like that. It was just…impermanent.”
“What happened when you were eight to put you into foster care in the first place?”
“Car accident. My parents. I don’t remember them very well. I was young, and I didn’t have my memory yet. Not the way it became later.”
“Your eidetic recall developed after?”
“The doctors thought it might be connected. Some kind of neurological response to loss.” She shrugged. “Or maybe it was always there and just hadn’t been tested yet. I was eight. I wasn’t exactly cataloging my cognitive abilities.”
Lincoln nodded slowly. “I’ve memorized code structures, security protocols, entire system architectures. I’ve built companies by seeing patterns other people couldn’t perceive.”
Morgan looked at him.
“I’ve also told people things they didn’t want to hear because the data was accurate and I didn’t understand why accuracy would be unwelcome.
I’ve corrected teachers in front of classrooms and wondered why everyone was angry.
I’ve explained to dates exactly why their logic was flawed and been genuinely confused when they didn’t call me back for another date. ”
His hands were steady on the wheel, but his voice had dropped. Quieter. More careful.
“I’ve been called too much too. Different reasons.”
He didn’t say same result. He didn’t need to.