Chapter 24
AMELIA
Adriver from Dominion Hall dropped me at the Embassy Suites like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“Have a good day, Ms. Emerson,” he said, perfectly polite, as if he hadn’t just driven me from a billionaire fortress full of ex–special forces brothers and their women.
“You, too,” I managed.
The automatic doors whooshed shut behind me. Cool, conditioned air hit my face—recycled, faintly citrus-scented, aggressively neutral. Lobby carpet instead of polished wood. Soft jazz instead of the murmur of power.
The normalcy of it made my knees weak.
Embassy Suites had never struck me as comforting before. It was just a chain. A place with decent breakfast and enough outlets near the bed. But walking across the lobby now, past the potted palms and the smiling front-desk clerk, it felt like a decompression chamber between two worlds.
By the time I swiped my keycard and stepped into my room, the quiet hit with full force.
I dropped my bag just inside the door, toed off my sandals, and stood there for a second, listening.
AC hum. Distant elevator ding. The faint thump of someone’s TV through the wall.
No Danes. No Byron. No Vanguard. No editor. No women who looked like they belonged on magazine covers telling me they were on my side.
Just me and the beige walls and the generic art of sailboats that had never seen real weather.
I exhaled and let my shoulders slump, the way I never did when anyone was watching.
The driver had offered to wait. To take me back whenever I was ready. I’d thanked him and said I’d call.
I wasn’t ready.
I needed time to let my brain catch up to the last forty-eight hours. To the fact that I’d watched a dead man come back to life, watched the man I loved fall apart, watched my editor twitch under pressure I didn’t fully understand, watched my own ethics shift under my feet.
And I’d eaten a lemon tart while five future Mrs. Danes took turns reassuring me that I wasn’t insane for loving one of them.
It was a lot.
I changed into soft leggings and the oldest, most over-washed T-shirt I’d packed—a faded Columbia University tee from undergrad that had survived more foreign laundromats than I could count.
I pulled my hair into a messy knot, scrubbed the last of my makeup off in the bathroom sink, and crawled onto the bed with my back against the headboard.
The room felt too quiet. Too still.
My brain kept playing a highlight reel.
Levi on the veranda, shaking in my arms.
Levi on the yacht, voice rough as he told me how close I’d come to dying two years ago.
Levi on top of me, saying I love you like it was a vow.
Meghan’s sharp eyes watching me over a plate of fresh-caught fish.
Hazel’s hand squeezing mine when she said, That’s you adding nuance.
My editor’s voice in my ear, reminding me what it had cost to rebuild my reputation.
The weight in my chest shifted from tight to heavy.
I needed something solid. Something that wasn’t built on secrets and NDAs and men who disappeared for a living.
I needed home.
I picked up my phone, scrolled past Editor, past Levi, past a cluster of unread notifications I wasn’t ready to deal with, and tapped Mom & Dad.
The call connected on the second ring.
“Amelia?” My mother’s voice came through warm and familiar, like opening the door to a house that smelled like soup in winter. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly, and meant it in the loosest possible sense. “I just wanted to hear your voices.”
She didn’t miss the qualifier. My mother could hear tone like other people heard sirens.
“Hang on,” she said. “Your father’s just outside. I’ll get him.”
I heard her call, “Robert! It’s Amelia!” and the muffled responses that followed. A door closing. The rustle of movement.
A moment later, the familiar double-breath on the line—my parents both leaning in toward the shared handset. They refused to own separate phones, on principle.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Dad said. “How’s Charleston? You sound tired.”
“I am,” I admitted. “It’s been … busy.”
Busy was an understatement, but busy was also the word I’d always used when I couldn’t talk about what I’d seen. It covered firefights and bombed-out streets and bureaucratic stonewalling. It could cover this.
“You eating?” Mom asked immediately. “Don’t lie.”
“I had a very fancy lunch,” I said. “At a restaurant on the Battery. Fresh fish. Sourdough that would make you both cry.”
“Don’t tease your mother,” Dad said. “She’s been trying to crack that sourdough recipe for a year.”
“I’m close,” Mom insisted. “The starter is just fussy. It wants attention. Like your father.”
He made a noise of protest that sounded exactly like it always did, and for a second, I wasn’t in a hotel in South Carolina. I was at the kitchen table in Ontario, watching them bicker.
The tension in my shoulders loosened another notch.
“How’s the assignment?” Dad asked. “Anything we’d see on the news yet?”
“No breaking alerts,” I said. “It’s more of a slow-burn piece. Long-form. I’m still in the ‘staring at strings on the wall’ phase.”
He grunted approvingly. “Those are the good ones.”
Mom hummed. “As long as no one is shooting at you this time.”
“Mom.”
“I mean it, Amelia. I’m allowed to ask. You promise me whenever you go anywhere near a conflict, you’ll tell me. Charleston isn’t a conflict zone, but you have a way of finding trouble.”
On another day, I would’ve deflected. Teased her about worrying. Reminded her that walking across certain parts of Toronto after dark was statistically riskier than where I usually went.
Today, I just said, “I know. I’m being careful.”
There was a tiny pause, like she was weighing whether to push.
She didn’t.
“What are you doing right now?” she asked instead. “Besides calling your parents out of the blue.”
“I’m in my hotel,” I said. “Hiding from humanity for a bit. I had an intense couple of days. I needed to hear normal.”
“Well,” Dad said, “normal here is this: I finally fixed the leaky faucet. The neighbor’s dog is still convinced our yard is his yard. Your mother tried a new recipe that nearly set off the smoke alarm.”
“It did not,” Mom said.
“And the Leafs lost in overtime again,” Dad finished. “Some things never change.”
A laugh slipped out of me, unforced. “Comforting.”
There was a beat of companionable quiet.
I could keep it there. Let them talk about gardens and the book club Mom hated but refused to quit. Let this be a normal check-in call with a daughter who happened to be on the other side of the continent.
Or, I could do the thing I’d been avoiding.
I could say his name.
“So,” I said, my heart suddenly tapping against my ribs like it wanted out. “There’s someone I want to tell you about.”
Both of my parents went absolutely silent. Not alarmed—just bracing. They had perfected the art of parental Stillness in the Face of Big News sometime around my undergraduate years.
Dad broke first. “A … someone someone?”
His tone had the hopeful caution of a man who once lived through my college boyfriend, the poet with the shaved head and the nihilist phase.
“A someone,” I confirmed.
Mom exhaled like she’d been holding her breath since the word Charleston. “Well. Tell us everything.”
Everything. God.
I picked at a loose thread on the duvet, suddenly aware I was in leggings and a ratty Columbia tee while telling my parents about the most complicated man I’d ever loved.
“His name is Levi,” I said quietly. “Levi Dane.”
“Nice name,” Dad said immediately, because he judged all men partly on whether their names sounded trustworthy. He still didn’t trust any man named Chad.
“He’s … he’s complicated,” I admitted. “But in a good way. Mostly.”
Mom hummed. “How did you meet?”
“Overseas,” I said. “On assignment. He was working with a joint intel unit I was embedded with. We … got close.”
There was a pause that wasn’t really a pause—it was the two of them exchanging one of their telepathic conversations.
“And now?” Dad asked gently.
“And now,” I said, voice softer than intended, “we’re … trying again.”
Silence, but warm this time.
Mom spoke first. “Are you happy?”
The question hit me like it always did—straight to the center of me, no shortcuts, no hedging.
I thought of Levi.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I am.”
There was a rustling sound on their end—Mom’s hand, probably, covering Dad’s in pure parental relief.
“Well, then,” Dad said matter-of-factly, “we’d like to meet him.”
A laugh bubbled up—surprised, shaky, real. “I … actually thought maybe I’d bring him up. Soon. If things keep … if things go the way they’re going.”
“We’d like that very much,” Mom said warmly. “Bring him when he’s ready.”
A knot I didn’t know I’d been carrying loosened a little.
We talked for twenty more minutes—about the garden, about the neighbor’s new grandson, about my mother’s ongoing war with the sourdough starter. They didn’t ask for details I couldn’t give. They didn’t tiptoe. They just existed with me in the tiny, ordinary corners of life I’d always come home to.
By the time I hung up, my chest felt less like a clenched fist and more like an open hand.
I lay back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling, letting the quiet settle.
Reflection came slow at first, like someone easing open a heavy door.
In the span of two days, I’d crossed invisible lines. Ethical lines. Emotional ones. The kind I used to treat as bright red boundaries but now saw as gradients, messy and human.
My mother’s question echoed: Are you happy?
I was. Terrifyingly so.
And underneath that happiness was the deeper truth I was only beginning to face:
It wasn’t just that I loved him.
It was that I was all-in. For him. For whatever this became. For however the truth unfolded between us.
And maybe that was reckless.
But it didn’t feel reckless.
It felt inevitable.
I must’ve drifted, because the next thing I registered was the faint buzz of my phone on the nightstand.
A text.
Please come to the window. —L
My heart stuttered.
I shifted off the bed and padded across the carpet, the room dim, night pressed thick against the glass. I pulled back the curtain.
And I froze.
It was fully dark outside, the sidewalk below lit only by scattered streetlamps and the soft spill of hotel light—but I’d have recognized him anywhere. Levi was standing three floors down, hands in his pockets, looking up at me with a smile that hit me dead-center.
He didn’t wave.
He didn’t shout.
He just stood there, steady and sure, like a man offering something wordless and enormous.
I threw on a hoodie and shoved my feet into shoes without socks, taking the elevator because stairs felt impossible.
When I pushed through the front doors, he was waiting just outside, leaning against one of the brick columns like he’d been carved there.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, breathless.
He held up something between two fingers.
A small paper bag.
“She-crab soup,” he said, lifting the bag. “Still hot. I hear you didn’t eat enough at lunch to count as a real meal.”
My heart clenched.
“I ate plenty,” I protested weakly.
“You picked,” he said.
I laughed, startled.
But then he reached into the bag and pulled out a second item—a small plastic container.
I blinked. “What’s that?”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice the way he always did when something mattered.
“You mentioned once,” he said, “that after long assignments, the first thing you used to do when you got home was buy that weird probiotic yogurt from the grocery store because it tasted like nothing you could get overseas. I figured you could keep some in the fridge in your room.”
I stared at him.
“That was years ago,” I whispered.
He shrugged a little, almost shy. “I remember things.”
A crack formed in me—clean, soft, opening instead of splitting.
“Levi …”
“There’s more,” he said quickly, like he didn’t want me to think yogurt was the whole gesture. He held out his palm.
In it sat a tiny, cheap compass.
Probably from the gift shop down the street. Plastic case, metal ring, the kind of thing you bought for five bucks and forgot in a junk drawer.
But my throat closed.
Because he knew.
He remembered.
“I lost mine in Aleppo,” I said, voice thin.
“You told me once,” he said quietly, “that you used to carry a compass because it made you feel like you could find your way home in any city. Even when you were scared.”
I swallowed hard.
“I thought,” he continued, “maybe you could use another one. Just until you find your bearings again.”
Something broke then—softly, beautifully.
I stepped toward him and he let me, letting me tuck myself into his chest like I belonged there.
His chin brushed the top of my head.
“I needed some time alone,” I murmured.
“I know,” he said.
“Then why come?”
His hand slid down my back, slow and steady.
“Because I wanted you to know you’re not alone,” he said. “Not anymore.”
The words wrapped around me like a blanket. Like home.
We stood there a long time, the sidewalk warm beneath us, the hotel lights buzzing softly overhead. Cars passed. People drifted by. None of it touched the bubble we were in.
Finally, I pulled back just enough to look at him.
“Are you staying?” I asked quietly.
He studied me in that Levi way—eyes sharp, expression soft. “Want me to?”
I nodded slowly.
His jaw flexed—not with tension, but something close to relief.
“Then I’ll stay. But first, there’s something I need to do.”