MeritAbi의 작품

POV: IrisI had been standing in the hallway for four minutes.I hadn't meant to listen. I had come downstairs for water and then heard Hailey's voice through the kitchen door and stopped because the tone of it was the kind that makes you stop, flat and precise and working very hard to stay that way, and I had stood there with my hand on the wall and listened to all of it.When she asked the question, what does she want with our child, I pushed the door open and came in.Everyone looked at me. Hailey looked at me the longest."How much did you hear?" Evans asked."Enough," I said, and pulled out the chair across from Hailey and sat down, "and I need to tell you something, all of you, something I should have said last night but I didn't because last night there was too much happening and I wasn't sure how to say it and I was also, honestly, still deciding how much I trusted this room.""And now?" Nancy said."Now I've decided," I said, "so listen."Nobody moved. Mabel set the kettle do

POV: HaileyI sat up slowly.Evans was on the edge of the bed watching me with the careful stillness of someone who has just said something they can't take back and is waiting to find out what it costs them, and I looked at his face and then I looked at the folded page in his hand and I said, "Show me."He handed it over.I read it. I read it again. The numbers meant less to me than they would to him but the confirmation note at the bottom was written in plain language and I understood plain language perfectly well."Six weeks," I said."That's what Marcus says.""And you've known for three days."He didn't look away. "I wasn't certain.""You just showed me a confirmed lab result, Evans.""I know.""So you were certain."He was quiet for a moment. "I was afraid of what it meant if I was right," he said, "I kept thinking I needed more time to work out what to do with it before I told you, and that was wrong, I should have told you the moment I saw the data, I'm sorry."I looked at the

POV: EvansHailey fell asleep just before five.I felt the exact moment it happened, the way her hand went slightly heavier in mine, the small change in her breathing, and I lay there in the dark and held her hand and did not move and did not sleep and stared at the ceiling and thought about the data.Marcus had sent it three days ago. A full breakdown of everything the monitoring devices had been transmitting, every biological marker, every reading across the weeks they had been active, and I had gone through it the way I went through everything Marcus sent, carefully, methodically, cross-referencing against the medical files I had spent two years reading when I was trying to understand what Nancy was and what she needed and what her physiology meant.I had not been looking for what I found.I had been looking for evidence that the devices had transmitted our location, our movements, our conversations, anything that would explain how Frost's people always seemed to be one step ahead,

POV: HaileyEvans came to bed just after four.I heard him come up the stairs, heard him stop outside the guest room for a moment the way he did when he was checking on something, and then he came into our room and moved around to his side in the dark, quiet the way he was always quiet when he thought I was asleep, and I lay still and let him think that because I didn't have the energy for a conversation and I could tell from the way he moved that he didn't either.He lay down. The mattress shifted. He was on his back, not touching me, which was how he slept when his mind was still running.I stared at the ceiling.My ability was doing the thing it did sometimes when I was too tired to manage it properly, running at a low frequency underneath everything like a radio left on in another room, not loud enough to make out specific words but present enough that you couldn't quite ignore it. What I was picking up from Evans wasn't deception, it wasn't the sharp specific signal of someone hi

POV: EvansI looked at the paper for a long time.The name sat there in Frost's small, controlled handwriting and I read it once and then I read it again and then I put the paper flat on the table and pressed my fingers against it like I could push it back into being something else, something I didn't recognise, something that didn't immediately attach itself to thirty years of memory.Everyone was watching me.Hailey was watching me the way she always watched me when she was trying to decide if I was about to lie to her, which was a look I had earned and had no right to object to. Nancy was watching me with the same focused stillness she brought to everything. Iris was watching me with an expression I couldn't read yet, which made sense because I had known her for approximately four hours.Mabel was pretending to look at her mug.I picked the paper up and folded it along its original creases, carefully, each fold deliberate, and I put it in my jacket pocket."Everyone should get some

POV: HaileyI read it three times.The first time my eyes moved over the words without fully taking them in, just the shape of them, the handwriting, the specific way she formed her letters, small and controlled and leaning very slightly to the right. The second time I slowed down and let each sentence land properly. The third time I read it like I was looking for something I had missed, some hidden layer underneath the words themselves, some explanation for how a person could write something like this and still have done everything she did.I never wanted to let you go. But they made me.I put the photograph down on the table and slid it toward Nancy without saying anything.Nancy picked it up. She read the back. She set it down and pushed it toward Iris.Iris looked at it for a long time without picking it up, just read it where it lay on the table, then she sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling and said nothing.The kitchen was very quiet. Evans and Mabel were on the othe