Page 31 of The Exit Strategy

She slides away from me, and the tendons in my neck tighten. When I meet her gaze, swallowing becomes a futile task. There’s something in her expression, or maybe it’s the absence of the thing she’s been using to keep me at arm’s length.

“You’re still designing?”

Crack!The lock around my heart splinters.

There’s just so much she doesn’t know.

“It’s what I do,” I mutter with a shrug that feels anything but casual.

“I remember.” Her voice is quieter now. “I used to watch you at three in the morning at home with graph paper littering the kitchen table. I was always in…awe. Before you, I didn’t know anyone could see things that weren’t there yet and make them real.”

The air between us thickens. My lungs forget their entire purpose.

“Will you show me? What you’re working on now?”

There are so many things I shouldn’t do with this woman, and this feels like a gateway to unlocking them all. Plus, the garden designs are in my upstairs office, along with six years’ worth of secrets covered in her initials.

But I do have the garden sketches on my phone. I saved photos last week when I was going to pitch the concept to the homeowners committee.

I pull up the image and hand her my phone. Our fingers don’t touch in the exchange, but the space between us feelscharged, like the air before a storm that hasn’t decided on destruction or just passing through.

She studies the screen with the same intensity she brings to my financial records. Pinching to zoom, tilting the phone, her brows furrowed in concentration as I hold my breath.

It reminds me of those times she talked about—at her kitchen table in the middle of the night. I knew she was watching me, sometimes adding me to her vlog, sometimes just needing a silent companion. That’s when it was innocent between us. It had always been innocent…right up until that dance.

“The pathway radius is too tight for a wheelchair,” she says.

I sit up taller. “What?”

“Here.” She points to my screen. “If Tony wants to visit, this corner won’t accommodate a turning radius. You need at least sixty inches.”

I didn’t even know she knew who Tony was.

She hands my phone back. Our gazes meet in the lantern light, and I have the disorienting feeling of being seen. Not the surface version people usually get, but the underbelly. The part of me that builds and fixes things when no one’s paying attention.

She’s paying attention.

“How do you know that?”

She shrugs, then tucks a loose chunk of hair behind her ear. “You mentioned it once. When you were working on a hospital design for a school project.”

She’salwaysbeen paying attention. Fuck me.

“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll fix it.”

“I usually am.” No snark, just facts. She pulls her kneesup to rest her chin on them, and I wish I had a blanket to offer her. “You built this place for them.”

“Not exactly.” I chuckle. “My original plan had been for families, but my designs were…well, I priced out a lot of young families. Before I knew it, I had…all of them.” I sweep my hands out to encompass The Haven. “They built this. I just drew the lines.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

I don’t know if I do. She remembers the version of me I thought I could be before I left Boston—the one who built and created instead of running—and now she’s trying to decide if that version of me was real.

I honestly don’t know anymore.

Her shoulder shifts, and at some point, I’ve drifted closer to her because the cotton of her sweatshirt grazes my arm, but this time, we don’t move away.

It’s nothing and literally everything. A centimeter of fabric against my bare skin, and it’s the most alive I’ve felt in six years.