Thursday arrived and I wasn't entirely in it.
I went through the motions of the morning the way you go through motions you've practiced enough times that your body doesn't need your full attention to complete them — dressed, lenses in, bag packed, stairs descended. But there was a layer of fog over all of it, the particular disorientation of carrying something heavy that nobody else could see the weight of.
Sky noticed before we'd even left the building.
"You look like you got hit by something," he said, handing me coffee at the bottom of the stairs.
"I'm fine."
"You're doing the stare again. The thousand-yard one."
"I'm tired."
He studied me for a moment, the easy grin dimming slightly into something more careful. "Tired like you didn't sleep, or tired like something happened?"
I didn't answer immediately, which was its own kind of answer, and Sky — to his credit — didn't push. He just fell into step beside me, quieter than usual, the specific quiet of someone deciding to wait rather than dig.
By lunch I still hadn't said anything, and the not-saying had started to feel heavier than the saying would have.
We sat at our usual table. Sky ate without his usual commentary, glancing at me every few minutes with the patient persistence of someone running through different approaches and discarding each one.
"Okay," he said eventually, setting his fork down with more decision than the moment required. "I've tried being normal. I've tried being quiet. Neither is working. So I'm just going to ask. What happened?"
I looked at my food for a long moment.
"You know how sometimes you watch a show," I said slowly, "and the main character has this whole storyline going where things are genuinely good — like, really good, better than they expected — and then halfway through the season someone shows up and just. Ends it. Not because the character did anything wrong. Just because the someone has more power than the character does, and decides that's enough."
Sky blinked. "Are we talking about an actual show?"
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically." He said it slowly, testing the word. "Okay. Hypothetical show. What happens next?"
"The someone tells the character it's over. Not violently. Just — clearly. With the kind of certainty that doesn't leave room for negotiation." I turned my fork over in my hand. "And the character has to decide whether to tell the other person the truth about why, or just end it and let them believe it was something simpler."
Sky was quiet for a moment, processing this with more care than he usually gave to anything that wasn't directly in front of him.
"What does the character want to do?" he asked.
"I don't know. That's the problem."
"What do you think the character should do?"
I looked at him. "If I knew that, I wouldn't be talking about a hypothetical show."
He exhaled, leaned back, ran a hand through his hair. "Okay. Hypothetically. If I'm the character." He thought about it seriously — actually seriously, none of the usual performance in it. "I think if someone tells you it's over and you just disappear without explaining anything, that's worse. Even if the explanation is bad. Even if it doesn't fix anything. People deserve to know why the door closed, not just that it did."
"That's one side."
"There's another side?"
"What if telling them makes it worse? What if the explanation just gives the other person more reason to think they weren't enough, when actually it was never about them at all?"
Sky frowned. "Then you're protecting them from a truth that isn't really that bad. You're just deciding for them what they can handle."
"Or I'm protecting them from something dangerous they don't need to be dragged into."
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically."
He sat with that, visibly torn, the specific frustration of someone who wanted to give a clean answer and couldn't quite locate one. "Honestly?" he said finally. "I don't know. Both sides make sense. I think—" He paused. "I think it depends on whether the character is protecting the other person, or protecting themselves from having to watch them get hurt by the truth. Those are different things and they feel the same from the inside."
I turned that over for a long moment.
It was, annoyingly, the most useful thing anyone had said to me all week.
"That's surprisingly insightful," I said.
"I have layers," Sky said, recovering some of his usual cadence. "Mostly snack-based layers, but layers." He nudged my tray. "Eat something. Hypothetical shows are easier to think about with food in you."
I ate. It didn't solve anything, but it helped in the small, specific way that someone simply sitting with you sometimes does.
The afternoon blurred past in the unremarkable way afternoons do when your attention is somewhere else entirely. I answered when called on. I took notes I'd probably need to re-read later because I hadn't actually absorbed any of it the first time.
By the time the final bell rang, I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
I got back to my apartment and didn't bother changing out of my school clothes before collapsing onto the couch. I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, running the King's voice through my head on a loop I couldn't quite shut off.
You will end this the way you choose to end it, or I will end it the way I choose to.
I was still there, mostly motionless, when I heard the knock.
Bella didn't wait for an answer before letting herself in — she'd stopped doing that weeks ago, the formality dissolving somewhere between the warehouse and the dinner table. She had a bag of groceries in one hand and an expression that suggested she'd already clocked, from the hallway, that tonight required cooking rather than conversation first.
"You look terrible," she said, by way of greeting.
"Thank you."
"I mean it as a diagnosis, not an insult." She set the bag on the counter. "Sit. I'll deal with dinner."
I didn't argue. I watched from the couch while she moved through my kitchen with her usual economy — onions, garlic, something simmering that started filling the apartment with a smell that made the day feel marginally less impossible.
"I got the report," she said, without looking up from the cutting board.
"What report?"
"Wednesday. TRAD sent the operation summary this morning." She glanced at me. "Clean extraction. Six-minute window, executed in five thirty. No security flags. Whoever wrote the letter content into the system marked it priority intelligence." She paused. "Good work."
"Thanks."
"You don't sound thrilled about it."
"I'm not unthrilled about the mission part."
She studied me for a moment, knife still in hand. "Something happened at the party that wasn't in the brief."
It wasn't a question, exactly. It rarely was, with her.
I told her. Not everything — not the specific weight of Cartez in Kenzie's mouth, not the particular ache underneath the relief — but the shape of it. The King. The study. The quiet, absolute certainty of the ultimatum.
Bella listened without interrupting, the way she did when something actually mattered rather than when she was simply being polite.
"He's not wrong," she said, once I'd finished.
I looked at her.
"Not about controlling her life," she added quickly. "That part's his own problem. But about the risk." She turned back to the cutting board. "If he knows who you are — really knows, not just suspects — then continuing to see her isn't just complicated. It's a liability. For her. For you. For whatever this is you're actually doing with TRAD." She set the knife down. "He's protecting his daughter the only way he knows how. Badly, probably. But the instinct isn't wrong."
"You think I should end it."
"I think you already know what you should do. You're just hoping someone else will say it so you don't have to be the one who decided." She glanced at me, not unkindly. "I'm not going to do that for you."
I sat with that for a while. It was, infuriatingly, the same thing Sky had said, dressed in different clothes.
Bella went back to cooking. I watched the steam curl up off the pan, the particular quiet settling over the apartment that usually meant we'd moved past the part of the evening that needed words.
"How did you know to ask," I said eventually, "if something happened that wasn't in the brief?"
"Because you've been somewhere else all day." She didn't look up. "And because every time her name comes up, you get a specific kind of quiet that doesn't show up any other time."
I turned that over. "Does that bother you?"
She was quiet for a moment longer than the question warranted.
"No," she said. Flat. Final. The particular flatness that sometimes meant exactly the opposite.
I didn't push it. I'd learned, by now, which doors she closed because there was nothing behind them and which she closed because there was.
This felt like the second kind.
I changed the subject, mostly because I didn't know what to do with the silence otherwise.
"How was the market place this week?"
Something in her shoulders loosened immediately.
"Better," she said. "The woman finally has consistent tomatoes again. I think her supplier switched." She glanced back at me, and whatever had been sitting heavy in the kitchen a moment ago had thinned out considerably. "You'd appreciate it. It's the kind of food that doesn't perform for you. It just shows up and does its job."
"High praise."
"The highest I give." She plated the food with her usual precision. "Unlike some food, which spends all its energy looking impressive and forgets to actually taste like anything."
"Are we still talking about food?"
"We're always talking about food," she said, deadpan, setting a plate in front of me. "Eat."
I ate. It was, predictably, excellent — rich and warm and exactly the kind of thing that made the apartment feel less like a place I was simply surviving in and more like somewhere I actually lived.
We talked about smaller things after that. Ferb's continued strangeness, which Bella found more amusing than concerning, at least for tonight. Sky's theory that Professor Alden had once worked for a government lab — Bella's counter-theory, delivered completely straight-faced, that he'd actually been a competitive baker who'd taken up chemistry as a creative outlet after losing a regional contest, which made me laugh hard enough that I nearly choked on my food, which made her almost-smile finally break into something close to a real one.
"You're ridiculous," I said, once I'd recovered.
"I'm thorough," she corrected. "There's a difference."
We were still half-laughing about it when both our phones buzzed within a second of each other.
Bella's expression shifted instantly — the warmth from a moment ago folding itself away, replaced by the familiar focus that meant work had arrived.
I read mine.
Friday brief incoming. New target. Stand by for full intelligence package at 0600.
Bella read hers at the same time, her eyes scanning quickly.
"Friday," she said.
"Friday," I confirmed.
She set her phone down and looked at me for a long moment — not the work-focus this time, something quieter underneath it.
"Get some sleep tonight," she said. "Whatever else is happening. You'll need it."
"I will."
She gathered the plates, cleaned up with her usual efficiency, and paused at the door on her way out.
"Marx."
I looked up.
"Whatever you decide about her," she said. "Do it because it's right. Not because someone threatened you into it." A beat. "Those aren't the same reason, even if they end the same way."
Then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, and I sat alone in the quiet kitchen with a full stomach and a half-formed decision and a Friday brief I hadn't opened yet, thinking about how strange it was that the people around me kept handing me pieces of clarity I wasn't sure I'd asked for, and how much I needed them anyway.