Chapter 5 Ellie
Ellie
By the time I finish brushing my teeth with the emergency toothbrush from my overnight kit (sparkly mint, thank you very much), the fire has melted from cozy blaze to sleepy glow.
The cabin hums softly—old wood settling, wind needling the corners, the big dog by the hearth giving a sigh so dramatic he could win Best Actor in a Winter Nap.
Micah’s setting a glass of water on the nightstand in the small bedroom he told me I could use. “You take the bed,” he says, like that’s non-negotiable. “I’ll crash on the couch.”
I glance at the bed. It’s a nest of flannel sheets and a heavy quilt stitched with stars, the kind of setup that whispers hibernation in a voice you don’t argue with. I glance at the couch. It’s… fine. If you’re five foot six and made of marshmallow fluff. Micah is neither.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“That couch is, like, five feet long.”
“I’ve slept on worse.”
“Have you, though?” I give him a look. “Honest question.”
He doesn’t answer. He just hands me the extra pillow he scavenged from somewhere and tips his chin toward the bed. “Lights out soon. We’re up early.”
“So bossy,” I mutter, but I’m smiling, and I’m pretty sure he knows it.
He steps back, lingering in the doorway like he’s rechecking the perimeter with his eyes. I know that look now—the inventory he runs constantly: exits, angles, things that creak. He nods to himself, satisfied, then gives me a soft, rough, “Night, Ellie.”
“Goodnight, Sergeant Buzzkill.”
The corner of his mouth twitches—that almost-smile I’m beginning to collect like rare coins. “Sleep,” he says, and disappears down the hall.
I crawl into bed and am instantly swallowed whole by flannel warmth. It smells like pine and faint smoke—the cabin scent that’s already starting to imprint on my nervous system as safe. I click off the lamp, sink down, and wait for the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness.
It does not arrive.
Instead, I lie there like a starfish, staring at the dark, listening.
The stove ticks. The dog snores, a little motorcycle noise that would be annoying if it weren’t adorable.
And out in the living room, the world’s tallest man attempts to fold himself onto a couch designed by tiny Scandinavian people with minimalist goals and zero empathy.
There’s a shuffle. A creak. A muffled curse.
“Told you,” I whisper to the ceiling.
Another creak. He tosses. He turns. The springs protest like they’re writing a letter to management.
Okay, this is ridiculous.
I throw off the covers, slip my feet into socks with little snowmen wearing sunglasses (do not judge me), and tiptoe down the hall.
The living room is dim and gold, shadows from the fire flickering across the ceiling.
Micah is on his side, one arm flung over his head, the other braced against the cushion like he’s trying to keep himself from sliding to the floor.
His feet hang off the end. Of course they do.
“Psst,” I stage whisper.
He’s instantly awake. There’s no groggy transition, no blink-blink-who’s-there. One second he’s pretending to sleep, the next he’s upright, eyes locked on me, hand halfway to the knife he keeps tucked under a folded blanket near the couch.
I raise both hands. “Whoa. Friendly. It’s just me. Your inconvenient house elf.”
He exhales, the tension loosening a notch. “You should be sleeping.”
“So should you. Or at least not… performing couch origami.” I point to his wildly uncomfortable position. “Switch with me.”
“No.”
“Micah.”
“Ellie.” He drags a hand over his face. “Take the bed.”
“It’s a perfectly good couch.”
“For a person who isn’t my size,” he says dryly. “I’ll manage.”
“You’re not managing,” I argue. “I can hear you fighting for your life out here.”
He looks at me for a long beat, as if trying to decide whether I am, in fact, worth arguing with at midnight. Answer: always.
“I’m not putting you on the couch,” he says finally, flint and certainty. “Non-starter.”
“What if I insist?”
“Don’t.”
“What if I beg?”
“Ellie.”
I grin. “Fine. What if we both take the bed and put a comically large pillow wall down the middle like we’re in a 1950s sitcom?”
His expression does a complicated thing I would like to study under laboratory conditions. He stands, and the couch springs practically applaud in relief. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
My hands fly to my hips. “Absolutely not.”
“I’ve slept in trucks, foxholes, and the back of a Chinook with a broken heater at fifteen thousand feet,” he says. “This floor is a luxury hotel.”
“That’s… an upsetting sentence.” My voice softens. “Micah, seriously. It’s okay if you’re uncomfortable. We can—”
“I’m not sacrificing your comfort,” he says, no room in the words for anything but truth. “Not on my watch.”
The dog lifts his head like he’s voting in favor of the floor plan. Traitor.
“Okay,” I say, because I’m learning which battles to pick with a human bunker. “At least take a mattress topper or seven.”
He shakes out a wool blanket, then another, moving with efficient, quiet purpose.
He makes a nest at the side of the bed—two folded quilts, a rolled sleeping bag as a pillow, second pillow from the bed, the wool on top.
He tucks the corner with military precision, then eyes his handiwork like he’s setting a trap.
“Did you just… make a bed on the ground like it’s a normal thing?”
“Yes.”
“And this doesn’t hurt your back?”
“It hurts less than listening to you pretend not to worry about me,” he says, and that arrow hits clean.
I’m suddenly a little unmoored. So I fuss with the edge of the quilt, then give up and sit on the bed, legs tucked under me. “Tell me about the war?”
His hands pause mid-fold. The question hangs in the small space between us, quiet and heavy.
He lowers himself to sit, back against the side of the bed, long legs stretched out on the rug. “There were multiple,” he says. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“You know what I mean. Your time. What you did.”
“Former Delta,” he says, like a line on a resume he never wanted. “Started in the Rangers. Got tapped for the big leagues. Spent years being inserted where people needed to disappear or be found.”
“Tracker,” I say, remembering Nate’s shorthand. “He called you a ghost.”
He huffs a quiet, humorless breath. “Something like that.”
“What does ‘ghost’ mean?” I ask gently.
“That if I was doing my job right,” he says, “no one knew I was there until it was over.”
That lands in my chest like a stone. For a beat, there’s only the tick of the stove and the soft drag of his breath.
“Was it—” I hesitate, not wanting to poke the bruise and still needing to understand. “Was it scary?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “Everything’s scary when you know what to be afraid of.”
“That’s… profound and not comforting.”
He glances up at me, and there’s the faintest edge of a smile. It flickers and fades. “You get used to the noise in your head. Then you get used to turning it off.”
“Is that what you’re doing now?” I ask. “Turning it off?”
“Trying.” His voice is quiet. “Not very successfully.”
“Because of me?”
He doesn’t look away. “Because someone’s poking at you, and I don’t like not knowing why. Because the packages escalated in a way that says this isn’t random. Because you came into my house and it feels different with you here.”
My heart does a foolish, floating thing. I tuck my chin, trying not to look like a human heart-eye emoji. “Different good or different bad?”
His mouth twitches. “Good. And bad. And complicated.”
I trace a fingertip along the seam of the quilt. “Can I ask something else?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
I smile. “When you say you were inserted places… did you ever feel like… lonely? Like you were a puzzle piece that got put in the wrong box?”
His brow creases, a small, surprised furrow. “Sometimes.” He tilts his head. “You?”
“All the time,” I say before I can decide if that’s too much honesty for midnight.
“At the center, I’m the one people talk to.
The one who holds it together. Which is good, it’s—” I search for the right word, settle on the only true one.
“It’s holy, sometimes. But then I go home and my apartment is quiet in that way that makes it feel like it’s pressing on your ears. And I think, Okay. But who holds me?”
I can’t tell what it does to him, that confession. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach for me. But something shifts in the room I can feel along my skin—like gravity recalibrating.
“You’re not alone,” he says, and it lands steady. “Not while you’re here.”
I swallow against the sudden lump in my throat. “Thank you.”
We sit with it. The dog lets out another novella-length sigh and rolls over with his back to us, as if to say, I will protect the hearth. You two figure out the rest.
“Do you miss it?” I ask after a while. “The work. The… ghosting.”
He considers. “Sometimes I miss the clarity. The part where the mission is sharp and simple. Go here. Do this. Don’t die. Back home, everything is fuzzier. People talk around what they need. Threats come wrapped in ribbons.”
“Hi,” I say, lifting a hand. “Threat wrapped in ribbon here.”
His eyes soften. “You’re not a threat.”
“I was to your couch.”
“That’s different.”
I lean back against the headboard and let my shoulder brush the wood, the tiny scrape grounding. “So… former Delta, tracker, ghost. What else should I know? Favorite cereal? The historical significance of your knife collection?”
“Knives predate cereal,” he says, like we’re on a nature special, and I laugh, bright and too loud in the late quiet. He doesn’t scold me for it. He just lets it sit there, a warm spot on a cold night.
“What about your family?” I ask, dialing it back to soft. “Are they… around?”
“Brother somewhere I can’t reach,” he says. “Parents gone. A few of us from different units stuck, found each other. We make do.”
Found family. My favorite kind.
“That must have been scary, too,” I say. “Losing the ones who taught you what steady felt like.”
He nods once. “You learn to be your own steady. Or you break.”
“You don’t look broken,” I say.
He makes a noncommittal sound. “Sometimes you don’t get to see the cracks until it rains.”
I want to smooth a hand over the top of his head and say something wildly unhelpful like I have an excellent umbrella.
Instead, I tuck my hands under the quilt so I don’t compromise our pact by accident.
No kissing. No touching. No distractions.
We made a rule. I will not be the one to break it within twenty-four hours. (Probably.)
“Try to sleep,” he says after a while, voice drifting. “I’ll keep watch. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
“Is ‘we’ll talk more in the morning’ your version of there will be breakfast?”
“Yes.”
“Pancakes?” I try, because hope springs eternal.
“Protein,” he counters. “Maybe pancakes if you stop trying to put marshmallows in everything.”
I gasp. “Blasphemy.”
He slides down onto the nest he made, one arm folded under his head, the other draped across his chest. He’s a silhouette in the low light—long lines, clean edges, the kind of shape that makes the room feel safer just by existing in it.
“Goodnight, Micah,” I whisper.
“Night, Ellie.”
I close my eyes and attempt sleep. It does not comply.
My brain is a pinball machine: mysterious packages, broken ornaments, Nate’s worried face, Micah’s mouth on mine, Micah’s mouth not on mine, the pact, his hands making a bed on the floor without a second thought.
The picture of him as a shadow in deserts and jungles, moving through darkness for people he didn’t know and causes he wasn’t allowed to question.
The idea of him grabbing my shoulders and saying you’re not alone like it’s a fact carved into the world.
I roll over. The mattress sighs. The dog makes a small boof and goes silent. I hear the subtle shift of Micah’s breathing, the kind of slow metronome that says he’s resting with one eye open.
“Are you awake?” I ask the dark, because I can’t sleep.
“Yeah,” he says, not annoyed. Just there.
“Does your back hurt?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
He exhales a half-laugh. “Go to sleep, Ellie.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
“I’m thinking about your past,” I admit. “About you in all those places. About how scary it must have been, even if you won’t say it. And how none of that scares me as much as the thought of going back to my apartment and feeling alone in it.”
Silence. Then, gently: “You won’t.”
“I won’t?”
“Not while this isn’t finished,” he says. “And after… we’ll figure it out.”
The sentence hangs in the dark like a star I could steer by. We’ll figure it out. No guarantees. No fairy tale stamped and sealed. Just an us-shaped promise I didn’t realize I was starving for.
“Okay,” I breathe, and mean it.
I try again to sleep, holding that line in my hands like it’s warm.
When my thoughts start to spiral, I think protein pancakes and no marshmallows, sadly and human bunker makes floor nest. I listen to Micah’s breathing, the steady in-and-out that has already become the tempo my body matches without consulting me.
And sometime between counting his breaths and making a mental grocery list I absolutely do not need, the dark softens, my muscles ease, and I drift at last—safest I’ve felt in longer than I can remember, guarded by a ghost who refuses to let me be one.