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North Beach. 10 AM. Sustained emotional stability practice in an open environment — operational follow-up to Thursday’s.

Mirelle read it twice. Put down her coffee. Eyed the Margot cohort on the windowsill, who glowed a smug, well-rested amber.

Sustained emotional stability practice in an open environment.

She texted back Fine, and spent the next four minutes not second-guessing this. Then she stopped at the café. Rowan conducted a quality review of the cork situation. Valene restocked pastries. Mirelle poured a travel coffee and, in passing, mentioned she was heading to the beach for a professional stability session. Valene studied her. “Wear the blue cardigan.”

“I’m already dressed.”

“I know. Wear the blue cardigan.”

“It’s a training session, Valene.”

“It is,” Valene agreed, having heard the thing and chosen to process only the parts she liked. “Wear the blue cardigan.” Rowan set a cork down with finality. Mirelle went home and put on the blue cardigan. She was not going to examine this. She had a professional framework and was operating within it, and the cardigan was irrelevant to that framework. She was going to the beach for a session and happened to be wearing a cardigan. That was all.

The cardigan was cornflower blue, and it suited her. She was forty-six. She was allowed.

North Beach was the town’s secret: past the headland, down a cut in the cliff that the tourism maps hadn’t bothered with. Quiet, found only by local knowledge. The ocean here was loud enough to make pretending expensive. Tor stood at the waterline when she came down the path, hands in his jacket pockets, eyes on the water. She got about two seconds of him unaware she was there: the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself as if the beach were his to assess. Then he turned as her footsteps reached him.

“You beat me here,” she said. “You sent the text an hour and a half ago.”

“I had to check the monitoring first.”

“For the beach.”

“The readings out here are cleaner. Lower pressure.” She settled beside him. The autumn Atlantic was gray-blue, enormous, and indifferent to any of this. “What do the readings say?”

“Stable. The ocean does something to the magic — grounds it.”

“That is genuinely the nerdiest reason anyone has ever invited me to the beach.”

“It’s accurate.”

“It always is with you.” Something in his voice had gone dry with amusement. She was not keeping track of it. She had left her notebook at home.

This was a mistake. She should have brought the notebook. She had nothing to put things in.

They sat on the dry sand above the tideline, and the gap between them stayed professionally appropriate. The blue cardigan was warm in the autumn light. Mirelle made a deliberate choice not to think about any of this. The ocean helped. It was loud enough here, with the headland channeling the sound, that you couldn’t hear yourself think unless you were really committed to thinking, which she was trying not to be. “You come here often?” she asked.

He turned his head toward her. “I’m making conversation.”

“You don’t usually make conversation.”

“I make conversation.”

“You ask work questions and occasionally answer mine. That’s not —”

He stopped. Half a smile. “I patrol the northern cliff line. I’ve come down this cut a few times after late shifts.” His gaze fell to the water. “It’s quiet.”

“The headland makes it louder.”

“Louder than town. Quiet in the sense that matters.”

She pulled her knees up and glanced sideways at him. He gave the water the same still, direct attention he brought to everything he cared about, and she was keenly aware that last night she’d been on a cliff in the dark, two feet from him, as he bled and told her he was fine. The sequence of events in her life lately had been genuinely a lot.

Sustained emotional stability practice in an open environment.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t usually tell people about the boardwalk walks, the training sessions, or —” she gestured at the general situation “— any of this.”