Chapter 9 #2
I looked at Travis. He had the expression of a man who’d lost this argument before and knew he’d lose it again. Something about the dynamic landed in a place I wasn’t expecting.
The way she pushed back on him. The way he let her. It was lived-in, worn smooth by repetition, the kind of ease that developed between people who’d spent years in the same space and had stopped performing for each other.
Except one of them wasn’t a person. And the man who’d built her had given her a voice and opinions, some humor and the latitude to argue with him.
I wasn’t even sure what to do with that information.
We kept moving. Every room he showed me was for a different purpose, but all arranged the same: purposeful, maintained, labeled, inventoried. The level of control bordered on compulsive, and I recognized it because I lived inside a milder version of it myself.
But where I labeled refrigerator shelves, Travis had built a self-sustaining facility with redundant power systems, independent water purification, and air filtration that belonged in a government building.
The pool corridor, which I already knew, looked different now that I could see it as one component in something much larger.
Two doors he walked past without slowing.
Both heavy, both locked, both fitted with keypads that matched the ones on the gate and the front door.
I didn’t ask about them. He didn’t offer.
The silence around those doors was deliberate, and I respected it the same way I’d respected his explanation of how he’d known I was in trouble this morning.
Not because I believed it was complete, but because I respected his borders.
He stopped at the junction where the main corridor split. “Down there is the server infrastructure. Communications equipment, processing, the systems Maude runs on. I’ll set up a workstation for you later so you can access your model securely.”
He reached up to adjust one of the ceiling lights near the junction, and his sleeve rode up past his wrist, exposing his forearm for maybe three seconds.
Long enough.
Raised welts tracked the inside of his arm. Red, angry, some fading to pink at the edges but others still raw enough to look painful. They ran from his wrist to somewhere past the bunched fabric of his sleeve.
“Travis, your arm.”
He looked down. Pulled the sleeve back into place.
“Hives. They happen any time I go outside. My nervous system doesn’t distinguish between real threats and perceived ones, so it stages a protest. Hives are the main event.
Tremors also like to join the act whenever possible. Nausea is the understudy.”
He obviously wasn’t looking for sympathy.
“Does it happen every time?”
“Every time.”
“The drive to Spokane.”
“Was about what you’d expect.”
I looked at his forearm where the sleeve now covered the welts. Then at his jaw, where the bruise I’d first noticed this morning had deepened and spread, greenish yellow at the edges.
The hives made sense. Agoraphobia could absolutely produce a physical stress response that severe. The body and the brain waging a real, visible war against each other.
The bruises didn’t track at all. A man whose body erupted in welts every time he walked out the door didn’t come home at three in the morning with a bruised jaw. That sort of injury came from contact. From force.
The hives said he was telling the truth. The bruises said there was another truth he was hiding.
He’d told me what he was willing to tell me. I wasn’t going to push.
I could wait.
I changed the subject. “I need to get an inhaler. The one we got at the drugstore was enough to get me through this morning’s event but it’s not what I’ll need long term.”
He visibly relaxed at not being the topic of conversation any longer.
“Unfortunately, I can’t call my pharmacy without flagging where I am. So unless you have a pulmonologist hidden behind one of those locked doors, I have a problem.”
“Maude,” Travis said.
“Already on it.” A brief pause. “Albuterol sulfate, ninety micrograms per actuation, standard rescue inhaler. I’ll have it delivered within thirty-six hours.”
I looked at the ceiling. “How do you know my prescription?”
“Your medical records are in a database that I accessed while you were talking. I also took the liberty of noting your prescription history, your last refill date, and the name of your prescribing physician, Dr. Lisa Manfredini in Spokane, who has a four-point-two rating on three different review platforms and who I’m sure is a very nice woman. ”
I turned to Travis. “Your computer friend accessed my medical records.”
He rolled his eyes. “Friend is a strong word. More like bane of my existence. But yes, Maude has access to certain databases that are better left unexamined.”
“That’s a felony.”
“Several, technically,” Maude said. “If it helps, I also ordered you three sets of clothes in what I estimate to be your size based on available data, basic toiletries, and a phone with a clean SIM that can’t be traced.
Everything will arrive through a delivery chain that routes through four intermediary addresses before reaching this compound.
No single point in the chain knows the origin or the destination. ”
I stood in the corridor of an underground facility in Montana, listening to a computer system calmly describe how it had committed multiple federal crimes on my behalf and was now arranging untraceable deliveries through a logistics network that would impress a cartel.
“Thank you, Maude,” I said, because what else did you say to that?
“You’re welcome. It’s refreshing to have someone in this house who acknowledges when I’ve been helpful. Travis tends to respond to my efforts with silence, ingratitude, or threats to donate me to a household appliance.”
He let out a sigh. “Like I said, friend isn’t the right word.”
Maude was the thing Travis had built to fill the space where a person would go, and he’d given her the ability to notice what someone needed and provide it without being asked, and the fact that she’d turned all of that toward me within hours of my arrival said something.
It said Maude took care of people even if the man who’d built her wouldn’t let anyone take care of him.
The rest of the afternoon passed in the strange limbo of a day that had involved almost dying but was ending in domesticity.
Travis gave me a spare laptop from one of his storage rooms, clean and unregistered, and set up a temporary workstation at the kitchen table while he worked on something downstairs.
I sat with it and tried to reconstruct what I could of my Kindt model from memory, but my brain kept drifting to the sound of Maude’s voice and the locked doors and the welts on his forearm.
By the time Travis came back upstairs, the light through the kitchen windows had gone amber, and I’d written the same paragraph three times.
He made pasta without commentary. We ate at the table and talked about encryption protocols, workstation access, and safe topics that kept us on solid ground and away from the quiet underneath.
But the quiet was there. Before yesterday, the last time I’d been this close to Travis for more than an hour, Naomi had been alive.
She’d been the center of every room, the reason he was there, the reason I stayed on the edges and kept my face composed and told myself that wanting him was a sickness I’d eventually recover from.
Three years later, the sickness was exactly where I’d left it. Untreated. Patient. Waiting for proximity to make it flare.
He cleared the plates. I washed them, because sitting still while someone cleaned up after me wasn’t something I was capable of. We moved around the kitchen without speaking, and once, reaching for the dish towel at the same time, our hands touched.
Brief. Accidental.
He pulled his hand back first. Not fast. Just first. And he didn’t look at me when he did it.
“I’ll have your workstation set up by morning,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
“Travis.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“Thank you. For coming to get me. For saving my life. For this. For all of it.”
He stood there with his hand on the frame, and I could see the tension running through him—the rigid line of his shoulders, the careful way he held his weight off his left side.
A man who’d driven six hundred miles in a day through a condition that made his body rebel against him, because I was in danger.
“Get some sleep, Sera.”
He left. The heavy door at the end of the hall opened and closed, and he was gone into the parts of the house I wasn’t allowed to see.
I went to the guest room. Sat on the edge of the bed. Plain comforter. Empty nightstand. Blinds drawn.
Last night I’d been a trespasser. Tonight I lived here. The distinction should have felt like progress, but it didn’t. It felt like standing on a ledge I’d walked to voluntarily, looking down at a drop I’d known was there all along.
I was in love with Travis Hale. I had been in love with him since a Sunday barbecue four years ago when he’d stood beside me in my parents’ kitchen and looked at me like I was a person worth seeing. He’d belonged to my sister then. He belonged to her memory now.
I was just lying in his guest room in his underground compound in Montana, and the guilt of wanting him was the same guilt it had always been, just closer.
I pressed my palms flat against the mattress. Made myself breathe. In through my nose, out through pursed lips, the way I’d managed my lungs my whole life.
Some things, I was learning, couldn’t be managed.