Page 41 of Omega's Formula

Eventually I can’t justify hiding anymore. I pull on jeans and a t-shirt, take a breath, and open the bedroom door.

Erik is at the kitchen table with a laptop and a coffee. He’s already dressed—of course he is—in slacks and a button-down.

“Morning,” I say.

He looks up. Our eyes meet and there it is again, that jolt of awareness that runs through my whole body. I look away first.

“Morning. There’s coffee.”

“Thanks.”

I pour myself a cup and lean against the counter, maintaining distance. The kitchen is too small. Everything in this apartment is too small.

I take a sip of coffee instead.

“Sleep well?” he asks.

“Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

We’re both lying. I can see the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. He slept about as well as I did, which is to say not at all.

Silence stretches between us. He returns to his laptop. I stare at my coffee.

This is what the next two weeks are going to look like. We’re going to sit in this tiny apartment, trying not to look at each other, pretending we’re not both thinking about what happened yesterday.

And that’s assuming we don’t repeat it.

I’m going to lose my mind.

“I need fresh air,” I say abruptly.

Erik looks up. “What?”

“Fresh air. Outside. I can’t—” I gesture vaguely at the apartment, the walls, the oppressive intimacy of the space. “I can’t sit in here all day.”

“The compliance requirements—”

“Say we have to stay together and respond to check-ins within fifteen minutes. They don’t say we have to be trapped indoors.” I set down my coffee. “We could go somewhere. A park. Somewhere with trees and sky and air that doesn’t smell like—”

I stop myself before I sayyou.

“—like the city,” I finish.

Erik is quiet for a moment. I watch him weigh the options, calculate the risks. Always calculating, this one.

“I need to be back by noon,” I add. “Visiting hours start at one and I want to see Ellie.”

“There’s a nature reserve about forty minutes north. Hiking trails, forest, that sort of thing.” He’s already pulling out his phone. “I’ll call a car.”

“You have a driver on standby?”

“I have a service.” He says it like it’s obvious, like everyone has a service for calling cars at a moment’s notice.

Twenty minutes later we’re in the back of a black sedan, gliding through morning traffic toward the edge of the city. Erik sits on his side, I sit on mine, a careful foot of space between us. The driver doesn’t try to make conversation.

I watch the buildings thin out, glass and steel giving way to brick and then to trees. The tension in my shoulders starts to ease as the city falls away behind us.