A MORNING BEFORE THE STORM(JULIAN'S POV)

I found her building a nest.

Two mismatched blankets over a sofa, upholstered in a white expensive enough to be its own quiet warning, and a string of fairy lights looped along a mantel holding nothing but a stack of decorative logs someone was paid to arrange and never light.

A wooden ornament, carved crooked on purpose or not, turned slow on its string in the draft from the heating vent.

"You've redecorated," I said, from the doorway.

She startled, one hand flying to the ornament like she could hide it after the fact.

"It came with me. Chloe insisted."

"I didn't say it was wrong."

"You said it in a tone."

"I don't have tones."

"You have exactly one, and you're using it right now."

She let the ornament go, some of the defensiveness draining out of her shoulders as it kept turning.

"It's ugly. I know it's ugly. It's mine, though."

I crossed the room, careful of the space between us the way I'd been careful of it since the hallway two nights ago, since the perfume, since some version of myself I hadn't fully worked out yet had started reaching for reasons to stand closer instead of finding reasons not to.

"How was your night?" she asked.

"Short."

"That's not an answer."

"No," I agreed. "It isn't."

She sat on the arm of the sofa, one hand finding its way to rest low against her stomach, a habit I'd started cataloguing along with everything else about her I hadn't asked permission to notice.

Her fingers weren't quite steady. She noticed me noticing and folded them into her lap instead, like she could file the tremor away before I priced it.

"You're still shaking," I said. "From last night, or from now."

"Both, probably." She said it plainly, no joke to soften it. "I keep doing the math on what all of this is going to cost me once the deadline runs out. I did it in my sleep, apparently. Didn't get much of it done."

"Don't."

"Easy for you to say."

"I know."

I sat across from her, close enough our knees nearly touched.

"I've never once had to. I'm aware of what that means, coming from me."

She looked at me like she hadn't expected the admission, and something moved behind her eyes that she didn't try to name out loud either.

My phone buzzed against the coffee table. I let it sit a second before I gave up and turned it over.

It wasn't my mother, for once. A name I recognized from the shop's paperwork, saved under a contact I hadn't expected this early.

Denise.

I held the screen up before Maya could ask.

"Something about the walk-in freezer. A delivery that showed up an hour early."

Her face did something complicated, relief and dread arriving together.

"Give me that."

She took the phone before I'd fully handed it over, already standing, already a version of herself I hadn't seen yet, brisk and certain, entirely unbothered by doing this in borrowed slippers three hundred miles from the actual problem.

"Denise, slow down. Tell me exactly what the display said before it cut out." A pause, her jaw tightening. "Don't touch the compressor. Prop the door, get the trays into the walk-in next door, and tell Marcus I said now, favor or no favor."

Another pause, longer this time. Whatever came through the line made her go very still, all the briskness draining out of her voice at once.

"Say that again."

I watched her listening, one hand braced flat against the mantel like she needed something solid to think against, the color leaving her face by degrees.

"How long has it been running like that." A beat. "No, don't wait for him. Call it in yourself. Now, Denise, not after you finish the trays."

"What?" I said.

She didn't answer right away. She held up one finger, still listening, and whatever Denise was saying on the other end had her free hand pressed flat to her stomach again, no longer a habit this time but something closer to bracing.

"Is anyone hurt?" Maya said, and the question landed in the room like a dropped glass.

I stood without deciding to.

"Okay." Her voice had gone thin and careful, the same practiced calm I recognized from every version of her I'd watched hold something together in front of an audience.

"Okay. I'm coming down."

"Maya."

She held the finger up again, eyes fixed on nothing, already reaching for her coat with the hand that wasn't holding the phone.

"No, don't call the fire department yet, just get everyone out of the building and I'll—"

She stopped mid-sentence.

I'd never once heard her stop mid-sentence.

"Denise." Her voice cracked on the name. "Denise, are you still there?"

The line had gone quiet enough that I could hear it from where I stood, three feet away, dead air where a voice should have been.

Maya looked up at me across the room, phone still pressed to her ear, coat half on, one shoulder bare where the sleeve hadn't made it the rest of the way, and for the first time since the blizzard blew me through her door, I watched her run out of a plan entirely, mid-word, with nothing behind her eyes but the raw arithmetic of how fast she could get down that mountain.

"Julian." My name came out of her smaller than I'd ever heard it. "I need the car. Now."

I was already moving before she finished asking, halfway to the phone on the side table to call down for it, when hers rang again in her hand, loud and sudden in the quiet.

She answered before the first ring finished.

"Denise."

"Phone died." Denise's voice came through this time, breathless but whole, and I watched years of practiced calm come flooding back into Maya's shoulders all at once. "Sorry, sorry, I dropped it in the slush running for the extinguisher and it just needed a second to reboot. Nothing caught. I got it out before it ever really started, I promise, I just panicked telling you about it."

Maya sat down hard on the arm of the sofa, coat still half on, the fight draining out of her all at once. "You're sure. Nobody's hurt. Nothing's on fire?"

"Nobody's hurt. Nothing's on fire. I'm an idiot with a dead phone battery, that's the whole disaster." A shaky laugh. "Marcus is already on his way for the compressor. I just needed you to know before you heard sirens on a scanner somewhere and assumed the worst."

"I did assume the worst."

"I noticed. Go back to whatever you were doing. I've got this."

Maya lowered the phone slowly, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the adrenaline still sitting in the room with nowhere to go now that the danger had turned out to be smaller than either of us had braced for.

"Well," she said finally, pulling her sleeve back up over her bare shoulder. "That was a lot of feeling for a phone battery."

"You're allowed the feeling. The battery didn't know that when it died."

That got a real laugh out of her, short and a little unsteady, and she let herself sink back into the sofa instead of standing, coat sliding half off again, the whole week's exhaustion catching up to her in the sudden absence of anything left to fight.