The second morning was harder than the first.
She'd known it would be — he'd told her, which meant when she woke with her chest too heavy and the replaying already starting, she understood what it was. That didn't make it easier. It made it named. Named was something.
She was in the bathroom when she heard the knock.
"Coffee," Hilton said through the door. "Black. It helps."
She came out. He was in the doorway holding a mug and looking at her with professional concern that was trying very hard to be only professional concern and not quite succeeding.
She took the mug. Sat at the small table. He sat across from her and pushed a plate of toast in her direction.
"Eat," he said. "Your body needs fuel even when your mind doesn't want it."
"Is this the part where you tell me it gets better?"
"I wouldn't insult you with that." He broke a piece of toast in half and ate it, which she recognised was tactical — eating so that she would eat without it being made into something. She took a piece.
"Does it?" she asked.
"It becomes a memory instead of a current event. The replaying slows. It doesn't leave." He held his coffee. "But the part that's replaying for you right now isn't just what happened. It's whether you would do it again."
She looked at him.
"Would you?" he asked. Not a challenge. A genuine question.
She thought about Hilton's back. The operative's hands. The half-second of certainty that had not asked her permission before moving her body.
"Yes," she said.
He nodded, once. Like she'd passed something.
"Mara," she said. "Tell me about her."
Something in his face went careful. "You know what happened."
"I know the operational facts. That's different from knowing her." She held her mug. "You said you carry how fragile people are. You've been carrying her for three years. She deserves to not be just a fact."
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that she thought he wouldn't.
Then: "She laughed at everything. Not nervously — she found things genuinely funny, in a way that made you want to see what she was seeing." He turned his coffee mug slowly. "She was trying to write a piece about artifact smuggling networks. She thought she'd found a fraud case. She hadn't understood yet what she'd actually found." He paused. "She trusted me very quickly. I hadn't earned it. But she did."
"That doesn't sound like your fault."
"She trusted me and I was four minutes late."
"The Covenant was there. That was their doing."
"My four minutes gave them the window."
Della looked at him. A man who had decided the distance between him and four minutes was his to carry alone, permanently, without the relief of extenuating circumstances.
"I'm not afraid of you," she said. "I want you to know that."
He looked up.
"I was, a little, at the beginning. You're very — a lot. And I wasn't sure if you saw me or saw a protectee." She held his gaze. "But I'm not afraid of you. I'm afraid for you. There's a difference."
He didn't answer.
His hand was on the table between them. Hers was closer to it than she'd noticed — three inches, maybe less. Neither of them moved.
"Della—" he started.
The kitchen door opened.
"Extraction team is here," Sienna said, appearing around the corner with her coat on and the expression of someone who had absolutely seen the table and the hands and the three inches and had chosen this exact moment anyway. "Moving to Safe House Twelve. Twenty minutes."
She disappeared back into the corridor.
Hilton stood up. He was very careful not to look at the table.
"Twenty minutes," he said.
"I heard," Della said.
She looked at her coffee. Thought about three inches. Thought about a man who had said I don't know what to do with that yet and meant it, and who was still figuring it out, and who she was — she acknowledged to herself fully for the first time — willing to wait for.
Within reason.