Page 103 of The Final Cut

“The clothes are out here,” I say.

The water keeps running. I turn to go.

“Reva.”

My name through the door stops me.

I close my eyes. “Yeah?”

A pause stretches between us. “Coffee with cream?”

“I guessed.”

“You guessed wrong.”

Something in my chest loosens painfully. “Good to know.”

The water shifts, and her voice comes again, quieter this time. “I’ll drink it anyway.”

I stand in the hallway until my eyes stop burning. Then I go back to the kitchen before I make her regret giving me that much.

Nash is on the phone with Shiloh, giving a clipped update. Ever watches the screens from the island because the war room is too far from the people who may need him. Deacon has leaned back in his chair, face pale beneath the discipline, but when I look at the bandage, the bleeding has not spread.

Nash ends the call. “Cal is still stable. No change. Shiloh is staying through the next nursing shift.”

“Okay,” I say, though okay is a ridiculous word for a world where Cal is sedated, Delia is in my bathroom, and Deacon’s blood is drying on my hands.

A few minutes later, Delia returns with wet hair combed away from her face, my clothes hanging loose on her frame, and bandages wrapped around both palms. Her feet are in the socks I left. She has cleaned her knees and covered them herself under the sweatpants. I know because she moves more carefully now, but the blood is gone from where I can see it.

She stops just inside the kitchen, eyes moving over each man, each exit, each visible weapon.

Nash does not tell her to sit this time.

No one does.

The coffee I made her sits untouched on the table, cooling beside the chair she left. Delia looks at it, then at me. I brace for another cutting remark because that is easier than hope.

She walks to the table and picks up the mug.

Her fingers are wrapped in white gauze. Mine are stained faintly pink from rinsed blood. She takes a careful sip and grimaces.

“Too much cream,” she says.

“I’ll survive the shame.”

Her gaze meets mine over the rim. “Will you?”

I do not know what question she is really asking. Maybe neither does she. I nod anyway.

I pull out the chair across from her because beside her feels like too much and farther away feels like surrender. Delia lowers herself slowly, and I grip my own mug to keep from offering help she has not asked for.

For a while, we sit with the table between us, wrapped in the hum of the locked cabin and the quiet movement of dangerous men pretending not to watch us too closely. There are a hundred things I want to ask her and twice as many I am afraid to hear.

I slide the sugar bowl toward her. She looks at it for several seconds, then takes a single cube.

Just like before, our fingers don’t touch.

It still feels like the first honest thing either of us has managed.