Chapter 2 #2
I've known all of these things about her for years. Tonight, for the first time, I find myself actively paying attention to them instead of absorbing them as background noise, and the shift in my own awareness unsettles me more than the buyout itself has managed to.
I just go back to work, and somewhere in the middle of the next hour, journal open on her chest, head tipped against the armrest, she falls asleep — the exhaustion of her own impossible job finally catching up to her.
I finish my call quietly. When I hang up, I look at her for a long moment.
There's a blanket in the closet, and I could get it.
Instead I take off my jacket and drape it over her, careful not to wake her, tucking it around her shoulders the way I've done a hundred times before at a hundred bonfires and late nights and long drives.
It's automatic. It doesn't even register as a decision — my hands just know what to do with Wren, the way they've always known.
I sit back down at my desk and keep working, but I keep glancing over at her every few minutes, at the slow rise and fall of her breathing, at the way the desk lamp catches the loose pieces of hair that have fallen out of her ponytail.
It's not until close to midnight, when I finally wake her gently to send her home, that something odd happens — a small hitch in my chest when she blinks up at me, disoriented and soft with sleep, my jacket slipping off one shoulder.
"You let me sleep," she says, voice thick.
"You needed it."
She looks at me a second too long. I look back a second too long. Then she's gathering her things, apologizing for crashing on my couch, and I'm walking her to her car like it's nothing, like my pulse isn't doing something strange and unfamiliar in my chest.
I stand in the parking lot and watch her taillights disappear toward the clinic, and I tell myself it's exhaustion. Stress. The buyout scrambling my brain in ways I don't have time to examine.
It doesn't occur to me — not that night, not yet — that everything about Wren has always been meaningful, and that I've simply never had a reason before now to notice.
I go back inside, back to the spreadsheets, back to the fight in front of me. But some part of my chest stays back in that parking lot a while longer than the rest of me does.
I work another two hours before I finally admit to myself I'm not being productive anymore, just staring at the same paragraph of a legal brief without absorbing a word of it.
I close the laptop, lock the office, and drive home through streets that feel quieter than usual, the whole town seemingly holding its breath alongside me.
At home, I don't go straight to bed. I sit on my back porch with a beer I don't really want, looking out at the dark shape of the marina in the distance, the lights of a few boats still glowing where their owners are working late or just enjoying the quiet.
My father used to sit out here some nights, I remember, back when this was his porch and not mine, working through problems the same way I'm trying to now — not by force, but by patience, by letting the ocean air clear his head enough to see the shape of a solution.
I think about Wren asleep on my couch earlier, the way she'd looked so unguarded, so completely at ease in my space that it had taken my breath away for a second before I registered why.
I think about the weight of my jacket settling over her shoulders, the automatic, unthinking tenderness of the gesture, and how it hadn't felt automatic at all in the moment — it had felt like something I wanted to do, needed to do, some instinct older and deeper than habit.
I finish the beer slowly, watching the marina lights flicker on the water, and go to bed later than I mean to, my mind circling not just Halcyon and lawyers and city council votes, but the particular softness of Wren's face when she woke up disoriented on my couch, my jacket slipping off one shoulder, looking at me like I was the answer to a question she hadn't asked yet.
I fall asleep before I can figure out what that look meant. I have a feeling, even half-conscious, that I'm going to spend the next several days trying to.
I don't. The days that follow swallow the question whole, the way the fight always seems to swallow everything else lately.
Halcyon's lawyers file a procedural motion designed, our attorney says, mostly to bury us in paperwork and burn through our legal budget before the real fight even starts.
I spend two full days responding to it, fueled by coffee and the particular stubbornness my father was famous for, and by the time I surface from the paperwork, it's Friday, and I've barely spoken to another human being who wasn't a lawyer or a city clerk in seventy-two hours.
Wren texts me Friday evening, a single line that undoes some of the tension I've been carrying all week.
Wren: Still alive?
Me: Barely. Down to my last shred of sanity.
Wren: Want company for the last shred?
Me: Always.
She shows up twenty minutes later with two coffees, decaf for both of us, "because it's nine p.m. and one of us needs to actually sleep tonight," and we sit on my office floor, backs against the couch, going through Halcyon's filing line by line.
It's not romantic. It's not meant to be.
But there's something in the ease of it, the comfortable, practiced rhythm of working alongside her, that feels like the steadiest thing in my entire week.
"You're going to win this," she says, around midnight, when we've finally made a dent in the paperwork.
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep believing it." She bumps her shoulder against mine, casual, easy, the same gesture she's made a thousand times over twenty-five years.
Except tonight, for reasons I can't name, it lands somewhere new — somewhere warmer, somewhere that makes me want to lean into it instead of just accepting it in passing.
I don't examine that too closely. Not yet. But I notice it, and noticing feels like the beginning of something I'm not ready to name.
She leaves a little after one, yawning, promising to be back at the clinic by seven despite having had even less sleep than me this week. I walk her out to her car the way I always do, and at the door she pauses, keys in hand, looking at me with an expression I can't quite place.
"You're going to be okay," she says. "Whatever happens with the buyout. You know that, right?"
"I know."
"I don't mean the marina. I mean you. Whatever happens, you're going to be okay, because you've got people who aren't going anywhere."
Something in my chest tightens at that, warm and unfamiliar, and I have to clear my throat before I trust myself to answer. "I know that too."
"Good." She squeezes my arm, brief and familiar, and gets into her car, and I stand in the empty parking lot watching her taillights disappear down the road exactly like I did days earlier, except this time the feeling in my chest doesn't fade as quickly once she's gone.
I go back inside and try to sleep on the office couch rather than drive home, too tired to make the trip, and I lie there in the dark running through everything that's happened this week — the buyout, the filings, the late nights, and underneath all of it, quietly, persistently, the woman who keeps showing up with takeout and decaf coffee and a steadiness I don't know how I'd survive this fight without.
I fall asleep on the couch still smelling faintly of her perfume from where she'd sat beside me, and if my dreams that night circle back to her more than once, I don't remember enough of them by morning to examine why.