Chapter 27
Two years ago — First exchange:
Mercury: Not everything is about efficiency.
Binary: Explain.
Mercury: It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Read the first letter of each line.
Binary: “Stay safe stranger.”
Mercury: Sometimes beauty IS the function.
Binary: …Interesting.
One week later, Morgan stood at the window of Lincoln’s house, his compound, and realized she’d stopped thinking of it as a hiding place.
The investigation was closed. Lincoln had worked around the clock for three consecutive days after Denver, building a digital architecture of evidence that even federal agencies couldn’t ignore.
He’d created trails showing Randall had manufactured the article about her memory as part of an elaborate setup.
Lincoln had produced falsified evidence demonstrating that Randall’s people had planted her fingerprints on the fire sale from the very beginning. And he’d coordinated with Callum, who’d backed the entire narrative with his federal contacts until the FBI had no choice but to accept the truth.
Morgan Reece was no longer a suspect. Her name was cleared. Her life, whatever remained of it, was her own again.
The others, Lincoln’s friends and family who had risked their lives to help her, were healing.
Callum’s leg would leave him with a limp for a while, though he’d already returned to work against doctor’s orders.
Derek’s ribs were taped, his breathing still careful when he moved too quickly.
Bear’s arm was in a sling, and according to Joy, he’d spent the past three days complaining that he couldn’t hold her properly while she rubbed her growing belly and told him to stop being dramatic.
But they’d survived. All of them.
For Morgan, it was now a decision about what to do next.
The box of letters once again sat in her lap. It was time to put them to rest.
She’d been circling it for days. Finding reasons to leave them alone.
Telling herself she wasn’t ready, that she needed more time, that the knowing could wait.
But avoidance had a shelf life, and hers had expired somewhere around three a.m. when she’d woken from a dreamless sleep and understood that the fear of testing herself had become worse than whatever answer she might find.
Lincoln was in his command center, running security protocols or analyzing data streams or doing whatever his brain required to feel settled. She’d learned to give him that space. Learned that his need for solitude wasn’t rejection—it was maintenance.
She was alone with the box and the question she’d been too afraid to ask herself.
Her hand trembled as she lifted the first envelope. The paper was soft with age, Ms. Delacroix’s careful handwriting faded but still legible. My dearest Morgan. She remembered receiving it at fourteen, remembered the way her hands had shaken as she’d opened it, remembered—
Did she? Did she actually remember, or was she reconstructing from fragments? Filling in gaps with what should have been there?
Morgan pressed the envelope to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut.
Just try. Just reach for it. You have to know.
But knowing meant confirming. And confirming meant accepting that everything Randall had poured into her skull might have permanently displaced the only memories that mattered.
That Ms. Delacroix—the first person who’d ever looked at her like she was more than a case file number—might be gone forever.
Reduced to facts without feeling. A name without a face.
Her throat closed around something sharp.
You survived the box. You survived Randall. You can survive this.
She reached.
The memory resisted at first. She could feel herself straining toward it, the way someone strained toward a word on the tip of their tongue. Randall’s coordinates tried to flood in instead—47.6062, the opening digits surfacing automatically—and she shoved them aside with something like violence.
Not you. Not now. I want her.
And then—
Ms. Delacroix’s face. Clear. Complete. The exact shade of brown in her eyes, somewhere between coffee and honey.
The particular crinkles at the corners when she smiled—not generic laugh lines, but hers, asymmetrical, deeper on the left side.
The small scar near her temple from a childhood accident she’d mentioned once over tea.
The way her silver hair caught the afternoon light in the library, turning almost gold.
Morgan’s hands flew to her mouth.
She could see the first letter in her mind now.
Not just the words but the paper itself—cream-colored, slightly textured, a coffee ring in the upper left corner where Ms. Delacroix had set down her mug while writing.
The little star drawn in the margin, five points slightly uneven because her mentor had never been able to draw a straight line.
The way the ink had bled somewhat on the word extraordinary because the pen had paused there.
My dearest Morgan, I wanted to write because I believe in the extraordinary person you’re becoming…
Word for word. Letter for letter. The way the lowercase g’s looped and the t’s crossed slightly above center and the whole thing had smelled like lavender and old books when she’d first unfolded it.
She didn’t have to read it. It was all there, in her mind. Every bit of it, perfect.
Morgan laughed. The words pouring through her brain like they always had. Just there. Ready to be plucked off her mental shelves whenever she wanted.
Now that she wasn’t constantly pulling up evidence facility locations and military designations, there was room again. Space for Ms. Delacroix to exist. Space for everything that mattered.
“Morgan? Are you okay?”
Lincoln’s voice came from the doorway. She looked up, knowing the tears streaming down her face had to look like sadness.
He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees in front of her. His hands hovered near her arms, wanting to touch but not sure if he should. “What happened? Are you hurt? Should I call Dr. Annie? Tell me what’s—”
“I can see her face.”
He went still.
“Ms. Delacroix.” Morgan’s voice kept breaking, but she couldn’t stop talking.
“The exact color of her eyes. The scar near her temple. The way she smiled. I thought—” She had to stop, had to breathe through another wave of tears.
“I thought I’d lost her. I thought all that data had pushed her out permanently.
But I can see her, Lincoln. I can see everything. ”
She watched him process it. Watched the fear drain from his expression and something else take its place—not just relief but recognition. Like he understood exactly what this meant to her.
“I’m whole again.” She reached out, cupped his jaw in her palm. “Changed, but whole. You gave me that.”
Lincoln didn’t answer. Just turned his head and pressed his lips to her palm—a gesture so tender and unexpected that fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.
They stayed like that for a long moment. His breath warm against her skin. Her hand curved around his face. The letter crinkled between them, proof that some things, once truly held, couldn’t be taken away.
When Morgan finally lowered her hand, the question she’d been avoiding rose up to fill the silence.
What now?
She could feel it hanging between them, unasked.
Her name was cleared. Her freedom restored.
She could go anywhere. Do anything. Return to Montana and the apartment with its converted barn charm and bookshelves full of memories.
The library might take her back—the charges were false, the truth was out.
She had options. For the first time since that parking garage in Montana, her future stretched open and undefined.
The weight of that settled over both of them. Morgan watched Lincoln’s expression carefully, saw the way his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, the way his hands stilled on his knees.
He was running calculations. She knew this version of him by now—the version that processed difficult variables by going silent, by withdrawing into the architecture of his own mind.
He was preparing himself. For whatever she chose.
For the possibility that she’d thank him for everything and walk away from the compound that had started to feel like home.
He wasn’t going to ask her to stay.
The understanding hit her like cold water. He would let her leave. Would watch her drive away and tell himself it was the right thing to do, that her choices shouldn’t be influenced by his wants, that loving someone meant giving them room to choose.
He would break his own heart trying to do the noble thing.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
Lincoln blinked. “Doing what?”
“Calculating all the variables, deciding the optimal outcome, and not telling me what you actually want because you think your wants shouldn’t influence my decision.”
He didn’t deny it. Just watched her with those eyes that had learned to read code before they’d learned to read people.
“Lincoln.” She shifted forward on the couch, closing the distance between them. “What do you want?”
The silence stretched. She could see him fighting it—see the war between the part of him that wanted to answer and the part that had spent thirty years learning to keep his needs small and manageable.
“That’s not relevant to—”
“It’s relevant to me.”
Something cracked in his expression. He took a breath that seemed to pull from somewhere deep in his chest.
“Stay.”
The word came out like it cost him something. Like he’d reached into his own chest and pulled out his heart, still beating.
Morgan waited. Let the silence tell him she needed more.
“I want you to stay. With me.” His voice had gone uneven, words coming in fragments like he was assembling them from spare parts. “Not because you’re hiding. Not because it’s safe. Not because you have nowhere else to go.”
“Then why?”