19. The Neuroscientist’s Heart #2
The answer returns, but the effort leaves a faint line between her brows.
“Is it her?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
The answer should be familiar by now. It’s been the shape of my life for a decade. No body. No final record. No proof strong enough to bury, mourn, or stop. Yet speaking it with Bliss beside me feels different because she doesn’t treat uncertainty as emptiness.
She nods slowly, her cheek still against my shoulder. “Then we look.”
Hope has always frightened me more than grief. Grief asks nothing. Hope demands I keep walking.
I close my eyes briefly.
We.
Not you. Not your grief. Not your impossible trail through records built by men who enjoyed hiding women inside numbers.
We.
“You don’t have to take this on,” I say.
“I know.” Her thumb moves once across mine. “I’m choosing to.”
The word settles quietly between us, heavier because she means it. Choice is sacred to her. Every small decision matters after a place that tried to make obedience feel like peace.
I turn my hand beneath hers and hold on properly. “I don’t want the weight I’ve carried for ten years becoming something you feel responsible for lifting.”
“My recovery is already tangled in your past,” she says, not sharply, but clearly. “You came because of Thandiwe. You stayed because of me. I’m alive because both of those things are true.”
I have no clean answer for that.
Bliss lifts her head then, looking at me with those grey-green eyes that are no longer empty, no longer fogged over into someone else’s version of calm. “And if this file is a door, Matthias, we open it together.”
The laptop’s cursor blinks beside the restricted field.
I look from her face to the screen.
Then I open the next record.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Baby Bump Club Café, Sausalito, California. 1100 hours
Steve’s text arrives while Bliss and I are still seated at the desk.
Coffee downstairs? Janice and I would like a word.
I read it once, then turn the phone so Bliss can see it. She studies the message, then looks at me with a small curve of her mouth.
“That sounds official.”
“Which usually means Victor wrote it.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No.”
Her eyebrow lifts.
I set the phone down. “A little.”
That makes her smile properly, and because I’m apparently no longer immune to dangerous things, I kiss her before I can pretend restraint is still my strongest skill.
We take the elevator down ten minutes later. Bliss keeps her hand in mine the whole way, her thumb moving slowly over my knuckles as the doors close.
“Where’s your mother this morning?” I ask.
“Walking along the pier,” she says. “I asked her to meet us for lunch at the Lighthouse Bar & Grill.”
“That sounds sensible.”
“She’s staying longer too.” Bliss looks at the elevator doors as the numbers descend. “I asked her. I don’t know what comes next yet, and I’m not ready for her to leave.”
“Then she shouldn’t.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“She said she’d already changed her return flight before I asked.”
I laugh softly. “A wise woman.”
“My maman,” Bliss says fondly, and this time her smile holds. “She said she packed enough clothes for as long as I need her.”
The café is quieter between rushes, all warm light, coffee, low conversation, and the smell of Marino’s restaurant drifting in from across the way.
For a building that has somehow become part hotel, part sanctuary, part operational hub, it remains astonishingly good at pretending to be normal.
Steve and Janice are at a table near the windows. Steve rises when we approach, and Janice’s gaze moves over Bliss first, checking without making it feel clinical. Her eyes linger on the color beneath Bliss’s fingernails before she smiles.
“Good morning,” she says. “You’ve been painting.”
“Yes,” Bliss says.
“Good.”
Janice says it like a diagnosis and a blessing at once.
“Coffee?” she asks.
“Yes, please,” Bliss says.
Steve looks at me. “Same?”
“Thank you.”
He gives the order at the counter himself, then returns with four cups and the expression of a man who has already decided where this conversation is going.
Janice doesn’t waste time. “Victor wants to make the offer formally, but Steve and I wanted to speak to you first.”
I wrap my hand around the coffee cup. “HAVEN.”
Steve nods. “Full-time, if you want it. Psychological programs, memory-altering protocols, counter-treatment development, survivor recovery support, and identifying any new Meridian facilities using the same methods.”
Janice leans forward slightly. “We need someone who understands what they’re doing before we reach the victims. Not after.”
I look at Bliss. She doesn’t answer for me. She wouldn’t. Instead, she squeezes my hand under the table, firm and certain.
I already know my answer.
Ten years ago, I would have asked for a day to think.
“Yes,” I say.
Steve’s mouth shifts. “That was quick.”
“I’ve spent ten years doing this alone,” I say. “It wasn’t wasted work, but it could never become what it needs to be without HAVEN’s resources.”
Bliss makes a small sound beside me, soft enough that it’s almost private. Janice’s smile touches the rim of her coffee cup before Steve nods, the humor leaving his face.
“Then welcome properly, Dr. Cross.”
“Matthias,” I say.
“Matthias,” Janice repeats. “We’ll build the medical framework with you. Dr. Tran will help with survivor protocols, Grayson and Felicity will secure the research architecture, and Victor will give you more data than any sane person should want.”
“That sounds like Victor.”
“It is,” Steve says. “He’s already made you a folder.”
Bliss laughs softly, and the sound changes the table more than any formal agreement could.
I look at her then, at the woman Meridian tried to drain into grey, sitting beside me with color on her fingers and light returning to her eyes by degrees. My work isn’t finished. Subject SA-07-25 waits upstairs, still only a question, but no longer one I have to face alone.
But the work has changed shape. It’s no longer a decade of walking into darkness with only loss for company.
“I’ll continue the research,” I say. “I’ll help identify every program they built, every doctor who participated, every compound they tested, and every method they thought would stay hidden.”
Steve’s gaze holds mine. “And the counter-treatments?”
“I’ll develop them. With HAVEN.”
Bliss’s hand tightens around mine.
“With us,” she says.
I turn my hand beneath hers and hold on.
“Yes,” I say. “With us.”
Outside the windows, Sausalito carries on in sunlight and water and ordinary movement. Behind us, the elevator can take me back to the file, the locked history, the possibility of my sister hidden inside a code and an age.
Ahead of me, Bliss lifts her coffee, looking lighter than I’ve ever seen her.
For ten years, every road I followed led deeper into darkness.
Then I found the woman who kept painting light, even before either of us understood why.
I’ll follow the light.