Page 46 of Heat Unscripted

He came up with two mugs, tea for me, coffee for himself, and stopped at the top of the landing. I didn’t look up. I was running her fever data against the timeline Tessa had given me on the phone that morning from her own experience coming off suppressants, checking the wave spacing against the published stuff on post-suppression heats in long-term cases.

Duration was normal. Severity was high but not dangerous. Full resolution by morning, as long as the room stayed stable and nothing else got thrown at her.

I was making sure nothing else got thrown at her.

I read Tuck by his breathing first, a little quick from the stairs, cedar on him carrying the warmth of whatever he’d been doing downstairs. Eating, probably. He ate when he was worried the way Bram worked when he was scared.

Then he crossed the hall and sat down next to me.

On the floor. He folded that big frame down with the ease of a man who’d spent years learning to fit into spaces built for smaller people, and his shoulder came to rest four inches from mine.

He held out the mug. I took it. Earl Grey. He’d remembered.

We sat. Through the door her breathing kept easing toward baseline. The tone from my speaker ran under the quiet of the hallway, barely there, doing its job.

“How long have you been here?” His voice was low. Not a whisper, just careful with the quiet around the door.

“Since you went down.”

“That’s four hours.”

“Yes.”

He took that in. His coffee sat on his knee, untouched, and his eyes had landed on the speaker against the doorframe.

“What is that?”

“Grounding tone. Tuned to her resting vocal range. Helps steady her breathing through the peaks.”

He took a sip of his coffee and set it down by his hip. His hands went flat on his thighs. Working something out.

“You built that for her.”

“Some years ago. When her stress markers said the suppressants were starting to go.”

“Years.” His voice dropped. Not accusing. Closer to wonder, except the wonder had a crack in it. “You’ve been doing this for years. The tone. The filters. The… all of it.”

“Six years,” I said. “The tone was year three. The filtering started year one.”

He turned his head and looked at me straight on. None of the blown pupils from the booth, none of the feral edge from the axe place. Just a man looking at another man and starting to get it.

“You love her.” Not a question.

I drank the tea. It was good, properly steeped, the bergamot clean. He’d used the timer on his phone, probably. Tuck was more careful than people gave him credit for, about the things that mattered to him.

“Yes,” I said.

It cost me nothing. It hadn’t cost me anything for years, because I’d never needed to say it. Doing it had always been enough. Four hundred and twelve interventions. Every stray frequency buried, every waveform cleaned, every bad moment killed before it reached her.

Tuck was quiet a long time. His coffee steamed in the cool air. Behind the door her breathing held at twelve a minute. Steady.

“I went at her like a freight train,” he said finally. Rueful, like an actor watching his own footage and not liking the take. “This morning. All that… need. And you’ve been sitting on the floor outside her door playing her a sound you made years ago.”

“Different jobs,” I said. “Same room.”

He looked at me again, and something behind his face settled. Not a revelation. A thing he’d been circling finally dropping into place.

“It’s not a competition,” he said.