Chapter 11 Patch Notes #2
She smiles faintly. “Wow. Didn’t even pretend to think of another question.”
I gesture for her to answer anyway.
She shifts in her seat, pulling one knee up to her chest.
“I had a panic attack,” she says quietly. “At work. It was… not cute. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see straight, convinced I was dying. HR wanted me to take time off. I convinced them not to. Went home and cried in the shower like a cliché.”
I blink at her.
“I hated it,” she says. “The feeling. The helplessness. The fact that my own brain turned on me. So I found a sliding-scale counselor and showed up. Told her everything. She told me my amygdala is a drama queen and gave me homework.”
“Did it help?” I ask.
“A lot,” she says. “Not overnight. But… enough that I don’t feel like I’m constantly one glitch away from blue-screening.”
She flicks the pen cap toward me, and it hits my chest.
“You know what the worst part was?” she adds.
“What?”
“I kept wanting to text you,” she admits. “Like, hey, the coding drama queen in my brain is DDoS-ing my nervous system, please patch? But you were… you. Busy. Distant. Wrapped in your own storms. And I convinced myself I didn’t get to ask for that.”
A quiet, sharp guilt slices through me.
I had no idea she almost reached out.
I would’ve… what? Told her to breathe? Sat on the phone with her all night, talking about stupid movies? Written her an anxiety-tracking script and hidden in the doorway while she cried?
I don’t know.
I should’ve made space to find out.
“Next,” she says, maybe sensing where my thoughts are going. “Your patch note.”
I roll the pen between my fingers. The urge to retreat into sarcasm is strong.
Instead, I go with something that feels like handing her a piece of my source code.
“Knight v3.1 critical bug report,” I say. “I don’t know what to do if you stop… seeing me the way you do.”
She blinks. “What?”
“You say you’ve had a crush on me forever,” I continue, staring at the notebook instead of her. “You look at me like I’m some… cool, collected vigilante who has his shit together and knows what he’s doing.”
“You are cool,” she protests.
“I learned to hack credit cards at fourteen because I wanted to eat,” I snap, then force my voice back down. “I barely graduated. I screw up more missions than I’ll admit to. I’ve ghosted people who cared about me because it was easier than telling them they should run.”
I take a breath.
“I like you,” I say, the words heavier than they sound. “More than I should. More than I know how to handle. But there’s a part of my brain convinced that once you see the whole ugly picture, the… non-heroic parts, you’re going to realize you built a pedestal out of fumes and bail.”
Silence.
My tongue feels thick.
“That was… more than one patch note,” I mutter.
She doesn’t say anything.
I risk a glance up.
Her eyes are bright. Not crying, exactly. Just… full.
“Knight,” she says slowly, “do you really think the way I see you is that shallow?”
“I think you fell for an idea,” I say. “And I don’t know how to live up to it.”
She sets the notebook down.
Gets up.
Walks around the table to stand in front of me.
I freeze.
She reaches up and pokes a finger into my chest, right above my heart.
“Newsflash, dumbass,” she says, voice shaking just a little. “I don’t like you because you look cool in a hoodie and can yell at routers until they behave. I like you because you showed up. Over and over. For my brother. For me. For people who didn’t even know you were saving them.”
She pokes again, harder.
“I like you because you taught me how to check for backdoors in my own life,” she continues. “Because you made sure our Wi-Fi at home was locked down after my ex got weird. Because you watched my socials for creeps even when I didn’t ask you to.”
I swallow.
Her voice drops. “I like you because you listened to me talk about some stupid indie game for two hours and pretended to care,” she says. “Because you made me grilled cheese when I failed my driver’s test. Because you never once told me I was too much, even when I knew I was.”
I feel like my ribcage is too small.
She takes a deep breath. “And now,” she says firmly, “I love you because you’re sitting in a murder cabin, teaching me how to break a grown man’s nose, trying to pretend you’re not scared for me. Because you’re willing to tell me the worst things you’ve done and let me stay anyway.”
My heart stutters.
She said love.
She said it like it’s just a fact, like the weather, like gravity.
“It’s not a pedestal,” she finishes. “It’s a chair. Sit in it or don’t, but I’m not writing you as some flawless hero in my head. I like you messy. I like you real. I like you exactly like this.”
I don’t have a script for this.
No quip.
No deflection.
Just a rising tide of something warm and thoroughly terrifying.
“You get one question,” I manage.
She smiles, small and sure.
“Do you believe me?” she asks.
I look at her.
At the girl who almost moved to Berlin and stayed instead.
At the woman who learned how to fight so she’d never feel small again.
At the chaotic girl who blackmailed her way into my missions and my heart.
I take a breath.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I think I do.”
Her shoulders loosen, like I just input the correct password.
“Good,” she says. “Because whether you think you deserve it or not doesn’t change the code, Hayes. You’re stuck with me.”
A knock on the digital door in my brain interrupts us—the mental alarm I set for our next check-in window.
I glance at the modem box.
“Time to see what the outside world’s done while we were emotionally compromising,” I say, grateful and annoyed for the distraction.
She grins. “See? Games are good for you.”
As I hook up the box and angle the antenna, my hands are steadier than they were this morning.
Dean might not have nailed ALFA07 yet.
Cathedral might still have our faces pinned to their wall.
But Lark knows more about me now than anyone aside from Gage and her dad ever has.
And she’s still here.
She’s still looking at me like I’m worth protecting, too.
That’s a patch note I don’t know how to process yet.
But I think—
I think I want to try.