Twelve
Savannah woke up already annoyed.
Her sheets were twisted around her legs, her pillow shoved halfway to the floor, and a dull pressure sat behind her eyes like she had spent the whole night squinting.
She didn’t remember dreaming about anything.
She just remembered lying there, listening to the apartment creak in the winter cold, too wide awake to settle and too tired to do anything else.
She reached for her phone out of habit.
No missed calls.
No texts.
No late-night alerts from the desk.
Nothing from Tilly.
Her thumb hesitated over the screen anyway, like she had expected something to be there.
She set the phone facedown and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her apartment felt colder than it should have, even with the heater running. She crossed her arms against the chill and moved through her morning routine like someone following taped markers on a stage floor.
Sink. Toothbrush. Hair pulled back. Concealer under her eyes.
None of it made her feel more awake.
In the kitchen, she poured coffee into her mug, then stood there holding it against her palms until the heat soaked through her fingers. She took a sip and flinched at the temperature, but kept drinking anyway.
She didn’t want to think about yesterday.
She didn’t want to think about the moment in the edit bay when she had said good work today and waited for Tilly to say it back.
She didn’t want to think about the look on their face when they had.
She rinsed her mug and grabbed her coat before her thoughts could loop again. If she moved fast enough, maybe her brain would keep up.
The station was louder than usual when she walked in.
Phones were already ringing. Two producers hovered over the morning rundown, arguing about transitions.
Henry had a headset around his neck and a pencil behind each ear, which was rarely a good sign.
Harper waved at her from across the room, then pointed urgently to one of the monitors, as if Savannah was supposed to make sense of whatever breaking graphic was flashing.
Savannah took a quiet breath and squared her shoulders. Noise was good. Chaos was good. Chaos meant she didn’t have to think.
She found Henry first.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“Everything,” he muttered without looking up. “City is pushing back the plow presser to this afternoon. Council member wants a pre-bite for the education bill. Fire wants a live at noon. Aimee is juggling show order and needs you to rewrite your tag. Also, graphics are backed up.”
Savannah rubbed her forehead. “Okay. I’ll start with the tag.”
She didn’t look toward the edit bays.
She wasn’t going to look.
She could feel exactly where they were anyway.
She lasted seven minutes before she did.
Which was longer than she expected.
Tilly stepped out of their bay, a drive in one hand, a coil of cable in the other. Their hoodie sleeves were shoved up, revealing the tattoos on their forearms, and their hair looked just slightly more chaotic than yesterday. They crossed the bullpen toward a camera cart. They didn’t see her.
Something in her chest dropped anyway.
Savannah snapped her attention back to her computer like she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have.
This was stupid.
And getting worse.
She wasn’t sixteen.
She wasn’t new at this.
She typed her script twice as fast as necessary just so she’d stop replaying the way Tilly’s eyes had lingered on her for that half second yesterday. The cursor blinked where she had left off in the tag. She typed a sentence. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that one too.
Her hands weren’t steady. Her breathing wasn’t even.
She pushed her chair back from the desk and walked to the break room because she needed water or air or something other than fluorescent lights and the sound of her own heartbeat.
The break room was half occupied by a photographer microwaving leftover chili. Savannah pretended to look for a fork in the drawer. The metal clinked against metal. It sounded too loud.
Footsteps passed behind her. Slow. Familiar.
She didn’t turn around, even though she knew exactly how close they were.
“Sorry,” Tilly said quietly, reaching past her for the box of tea bags on the counter.
Heat rose under Savannah’s skin. She kept her eyes on the drawer.
“It’s fine,” she said.
They stepped back, but didn’t leave.
And she felt it like pressure on her back.
“You need the bay?” they asked.
“No,” she said quickly. “I’m good.”
“Okay.”
They walked out.
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
She filled a cup with water and brought it to her lips, but didn’t drink it.
She avoided the edit bays for the next hour, even though she needed a soundbite from yesterday’s interviews. She asked Harper for it instead. Harper frowned.
“Tilly already pulled it,” she said. “It’s in the folder with your name.”
Savannah nodded. “Right. Thanks.”
She walked back to her desk and opened the folder.
The clip was clean. Levels balanced. Color corrected.
Tilly had done it without being asked.
Like they knew she’d need it.
Her chest tightened.
She didn’t like how that felt either.
By noon, the newsroom was back to full volume.
Savannah’s source for the education story canceled with no warning.
One of her scripts bounced back from Aimee with a note so vague she couldn’t even be annoyed about it.
Someone in graphics had mislabeled a file, which sent a ripple of confusion through the producers.
Savannah tried to stay steady. Tried to keep her voice even. Tried to keep every line of the day neat and controlled.
But her fingers shook when she recorded her track.
She had to stop and redo it twice.
On the third attempt, she saw movement behind the glass.
Tilly stood in the hallway outside the audio booth, coiling a cable slowly, eyes flicking up toward her like they had felt something off. Like they were paying attention even when she wasn’t looking. They didn’t knock or interrupt. They just waited there for a beat before walking on.
The moment hung in her chest long after they were gone.
Longer than anything else that day.
Later in the afternoon, Henry handed her another assignment for tomorrow, then scribbled something on his board that made little sense.
She walked past Tilly on her way back to her desk. They were restocking batteries in the gear closet, their back turned. She could have kept going.
She didn’t.
“You found the clip,” she said, stopping just shy of the doorway.
“I did,” they replied, still facing the shelves. “Figured you’d need it.”
Savannah nodded. “Thanks.”
A battery pack clicked into place on the rack. Tilly’s hands stayed there a second longer than necessary.
“You could’ve just asked me,” they added, quietly, like they were commenting on the weather.
Heat crept up Savannah’s neck. “Harper was right there.”
“Yeah,” Tilly said.
Not sharp. Not upset. Just a fact.
They finally turned, meeting her eyes for the briefest second, and she felt it all over again—sharp, immediate, impossible to ignore.
“It’s in the folder now,” they said. “All set.”
Right.
Simple.
Work.
“Okay,” Savannah said.
She waited one beat too long before leaving.
Savannah left the station when the sky had already turned that heavy gray that always made the city feel colder. Her legs were tired. Her shoulders were sore. Her head ached.
She unlocked her apartment and stepped into the same quiet she had been trying not to acknowledge all week. She set her keys down. Hung her coat. Stood there in the middle of her living room with her arms crossed tight.
She thought about texting someone.
Her sister.
A friend from Providence.
Anyone.
Instead, she sat on the couch and stared at her phone for a long moment, not because she wanted to reach out, but because she hated that she knew exactly whose voice she wished she could hear.
She put the phone facedown.
The room was too quiet.
She wasn’t lonely, she told herself.
She was tired.
She was stressed.
She was focused on work.
But when she closed her eyes, the last thing she saw was the way Tilly had paused in the hallway outside the audio booth, like they had heard something in her voice she had tried to hide.
It followed her into sleep the same way her words had followed them home.