Chapter 5
Logan
In approximately two minutes, Audrey Greene is going to walk through that door.
I’ve been staring at the same page of notes for the last half hour, absorbing nothing.
The words blur together—encryption protocols, signal degradation, frequency modulation—all meaningless noise compared to the single thought running on loop in my brain:
She looked at me this morning like I was a stranger.
Like three months had erased everything we were.
Like I was nothing.
I deserved it. I know I deserved it. But knowing doesn’t make it hurt less.
The lab is quiet. Cold. The server hum is the only sound, a white noise that usually calms me. Today it just fills the silence where my thoughts keep spiraling.
She’s blonde now?
I noticed it the second I walked into that conference room.
The hair I used to imagine touching—dark and soft, curls that always escaped whatever clip she’d used to pin it back—is gone.
Replaced by something sharper. Colder. A color that doesn’t look like her.
A shape that doesn’t read as familiar, even though it is.
And on top of that, she wasn’t wearing her glasses. Contacts, maybe. Or laser? That’s another thing that changed while I wasn’t watching. The old Audrey would have told me. Would have given a TED Talk on the biomechanics of her new corneas or the merits of contact lenses versus corrective surgery.
The new Audrey doesn’t over-explain. The new Audrey walks in at exactly 2:00:26 carrying a gray folder, her posture so precise it’s like she’s been reverse-engineered for maximum intimidation.
But her body is still the same. Still soft where the Stockholm dress clings to her hips.
Still curved in ways that make my hands ache with the memory of almost touching her—all those times in the old lab when she’d lean across me to point at something on my screen and I’d have to grip the edge of my desk to keep from reaching for her.
I have one irrational, vivid memory of tracing the curve of her back with my eyes during a late night at the old Carmichael lab. The recall is so sharp it knocks my train of thought clean off the tracks.
She sits at the workstation next to me, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off her skin. No smile, not even a tight-lipped one. She flips open the folder and starts talking before I can even manage a greeting.
I’m not listening. Not really. I’m too busy trying not to stare at the way she’s crossed her legs, the soft curve of her thigh under the fabric. In the eleven months I spent knowing her, working beside her, I never stopped noticing. Never stopped wanting. I just got better at hiding it.
“You agreed to walk me through the test results.” She positions her chair so she can see my screen—not too close, not too far. Calculated distance. “Let’s get started.”
“Right. Yes. Of course.” I turn to my laptop, grateful for something to focus on that isn’t her face. “I’ve organized everything by protocol layer. If we start with the encryption framework, the rest will make more sense.”
“Fine.”
I pull up the first document. Start explaining. The words come automatically—I’ve given this presentation to myself a hundred times, rehearsing for this exact moment. Signal encryption. Data packet integrity. Authentication handshakes.
She takes notes. Asks questions. Good questions—sharp, incisive, the kind that prove she’s already three steps ahead of my explanations.
But she waits for me to finish before she speaks. Polite pauses. Professional turn-taking.
It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.
Before Sweden, we used to talk over each other constantly.
Ideas ricocheting back and forth so fast that anyone listening would think we were arguing.
We’d leap from encryption theory to coffee preferences to obscure historical facts to signal processing without taking a breath, and somehow we always kept pace.
Bennett once said watching us work together was like watching a tennis match on fast-forward.
Dominic would insist he’s my best friend.
And sure, technically, he’s earned the title—he shows up, he texts, he drags me to social events I’d rather avoid.
But Audrey was always... different. She was the person I actually wanted to talk to.
The one whose brain worked the way mine did, only better.
The one who never made me feel like a freak for knowing too much or caring about the wrong things.
She was my favorite person.
And the only person whose body made mine feel like it finally had a purpose—even if I never figured out how to act on it.
And now she’s treating me like a colleague she tolerates.
“The FDA’s main concern is the encryption strength during high-density transmission,” I continue, pulling up a graph. My voice sounds robotic to my own ears. “When multiple devices are operating in close proximity, the signal interference creates vulnerabilities in the—”
“I know what the concern is.” Flat. Clinical. “I read the CRL. What I need to know is what you’ve tried so far and why it hasn’t worked.”
I flinch internally. Externally, I keep my expression neutral.
“We’ve attempted three different approaches to the encryption protocol.
” I click through the slides. “The first was a frequency-hopping pattern that reduced interference by 34%, but introduced latency issues that affected real-time neural feedback. The second was a shielded transmission buffer, which solved the latency problem but reduced the effective range by 60%. The third—”
“Show me the data on the frequency-hopping approach.”
I pull it up. She leans forward to look at the screen, and the movement brings her closer—close enough that I can see the soft skin at the base of her throat, the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.
I catch a hint of something floral. Unfamiliar.
She used to smell like vanilla and coffee, and I knew that scent so well I could have identified her blindfolded.
This new perfume is like everything else about her now. A wall I can’t get past.
But underneath the changes, she’s still her.
Still the woman whose body I’ve memorized without ever touching.
I know the exact spot where her neck meets her shoulder—I’ve imagined pressing my mouth there more times than I can count.
I know the way her hips sway when she’s pacing through a problem.
I know that her hands are small and soft because once, just once, she grabbed my wrist to look at my watch, and I felt that touch for days afterward.
I want her so badly it’s a physical ache. I always have. I just never knew what to do about it.
I still don’t.
“The latency spike occurs here.” I point to the graph, forcing myself to focus. “At approximately 3.7 milliseconds, which is outside the acceptable threshold for real-time neural interface applications.”
She studies the data, her brow furrowed in concentration. I know this expression. I’ve seen it a thousand times—in the lab, in meetings, across the table at late-night debugging sessions when it was just the two of us against some impossible problem.
I miss those nights. I miss her. The way I imagine people miss a limb—phantom pain in the space where she used to be, my brain still reaching for something that’s no longer there.
I miss the specific geography of her. The way she’d tuck her legs up on her chair when she was deep in thought, all soft curves folded into the smallest possible space.
The way she’d stretch after hours at her desk, arms above her head, back arching in a way that made me forget how to breathe.
The way she fit against my side the one time she fell asleep on my shoulder during an all-nighter—warm and heavy and right, and I sat perfectly still for two hours because I didn’t want it to end.
I never told her any of that. Never told her that my body recognized hers as home long before my brain caught up.
“What if we staggered the frequency hops?” she says, half to herself. “Instead of a random pattern, we could implement a predictive algorithm based on neural signal priority. High-priority transmissions get first access to clean frequencies, lower-priority data queues until bandwidth opens up.”
“That... could work.” I’m already running the numbers in my head. “The latency would still be an issue for the queued data, but if we weight the priority algorithm correctly—”
“The brain doesn’t process all neural signals equally, anyway.” She’s warming to the idea now, her voice losing some of its careful coldness. “Sensory input takes priority over motor feedback in most processing hierarchies. If we mirror that in the transmission protocol...”
“We’d be working with the brain’s natural architecture instead of against it.”
“Exactly.”
For a brief moment it feels like before.
Our minds clicking into synchronization, finishing each other’s thoughts, that effortless rhythm I’ve never found with anyone else.
My pulse is doing something it shouldn’t.
I’m leaning toward her without meaning to, drawn into her orbit the way I always was.
This is the cruelest part. My brain can match hers perfectly—can dance with her intellect like it was designed for exactly this.
But my body is a foreign language I never learned.
I can think in perfect tandem with her, but I can’t close the six inches between us.
Can’t reach over and touch the soft curve of her cheek the way I’ve imagined.
Can’t pull her into my lap and bury my face in her neck and finally, finally find out what she tastes like.
I want to. God, I want to. The wanting is so loud it’s a wonder she can’t hear it.