Page 37 of Heat Unscripted

I should go down. I should be in it.

I didn’t move.

Bram was making breakfast.

I figured that out when the smell of eggs and coffee got up to the bedroom, sitting weird against the peppercorn and old-books underneath it. By the time I’d dragged my dead arm out from under Isobel without waking her, pulled on yesterday’s trousers, and made it down the narrow stairs, he was at the kitchen island with his sleeves rolled and a pan in his hand.

He looked off.

I couldn’t have told you how, exactly. Off the way a photo’s off when the exposure’s wrong, everything’s there, everything works, but the light’s hitting at an angle that shows you stuff the man didn’t mean to show.

His hair was a mess. First time I’d ever seen that on him. The gray in it wasn’t where he usually put it, it was just sticking up, like he’d been dragging his hands through it. No waistcoat. Just the white shirt, creased at the back, untucked on one side. The kind of thing Bram would’ve fixed the second he noticed it.

His scent was held tight. The peppercorn dialled right down, clamped, no give in it. He had his own biology on a short leash and I could smell the effort.

“Morning,” I said.

He looked up, quick. His eyes were clear, no blown pupils, nothing left of last night’s overload. Just the careful, working attention he put on everything, all back together. All running. All behind glass.

“Coffee’s on the counter. Eggs in two minutes.”

“You don’t have to?—”

“I’m already doing it.” He turned back to the pan. Spare little movements. He’d worked out exactly what the job was and was doing it and nothing else.

Cillian was at the small kitchen table with his tablet, two phones face-down by his elbow that weren’t his, Bram’s and mine, dug out of wherever he’d stashed them last night, and a mug of something dark in front of him. His eyes came up, took the read off me, went back to the screen.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Asleep. Deep. The crash seems?—”

“Burned off.” He didn’t look up. “Her breathing changed before dawn. Temperature settled after that. She’ll most likely sleep a while more and wake up starving.” He tipped the tabletat me, some graph I couldn’t read. “She’s rebuilding. She’s going to be fine.”

He knew that from sound. From whatever he’d been pulling out of the air through the walls all night. My stomach did something complicated, somewhere between grateful and dizzy.

“The phones?” I nodded at the table.

“Ninety-three missed on Bram’s. Forty-seven on yours. I’ve sorted them. Crew, network, press, personal. Nothing needs you right now.”

Bram slid a plate of eggs at me across the counter, didn’t say anything. Didn’t slow down either. He was already doing a second plate, smaller, lined up too neat, a glass of water beside it.

“For Isobel,” he said. “When she wakes.”

“You could take it up to her.”

Something went across his face and was gone before it got anywhere.

“I’ve got calls.” He set the plate down, covered it with a clean cloth, picked up his phone the way you pick up a wrench, not a hand reaching out for help. “Network legal left three voicemails. Cillian’s drafted what we say back, but they’ll want my voice on it.”

He was already moving. Already pointed at the door, at the work waiting, real work, work somebody had to do while the world made up its mind about last night.

But I knew the move.

He couldn’t sit still with whatever he was feeling, so he was pouring it into the nearest thing that had a clear edge. I’d watched him do it for years. In the booth, in meetings, every time something landed that didn’t fit his frameworks, he’d just build a new framework fast enough that you never saw the gap.

He stopped in the doorway. Half-turned. His eyes went to the plate he’d made for her, then up to me. I couldn’t read his face,he had that nailed shut. But his scent, tight as he held it, let one thing through.

He was scared.