Page 34 of The Hitman’s Final Job

Mornings like these are usually seen from the other side. When I’m still awake, rather than I’ve just woken up, and usually what causes the lack of sleep is equations, soil chemistry, or answers to problems that feel like they’re within my grasp but still elude me.

This morning my mind isn’t running equations.

My mind is doing what it’s been doing every night for the last several days, which is considerably less productive and way more inconvenient.

The bedroom across the hall is twelve feet from mine. One door between us. Silas, sleeping or not sleeping, twelve feet away.

I’ve been lying here not knocking on that door every single night since he arrived.

It takes more willpower than I thought it would considering it’s not the first time we’ve slept under the same roof.

I throw back the covers.

What I need is cold air and coffee. I pull on sweatpants and a sweater and go downstairs.

The kitchen is dark except for the light above the stove, which I leave on overnight as a habit left over from when Rowan was young, and somehow, despite him being thirty and no longer living with me, I still do it.

The light on the horizon through the kitchen window is that deep blue that comes in the last half hour before sunrise. Not full dark but also not light yet.

The scent of coffee helps wake up some of my brain cells, so I go to the coffee pot and see it’s not only full, but warm.

Is Silas struggling to sleep too? The house is quiet now, so maybe he made his coffee and went back to bed.

I fill my mug and go out to the back porch, nearly jumping when I see the lone figure on the bench.

“Morning,” he says.

He’s sitting with his own mug held in both hands and his legs stretched out in front of him, wearing a gray long-sleeved shirt, sweatpants, and socks that have little guns on them.

“Cute socks.”

He wiggles his feet. “I have them in lots of colors if you ever want to borrow them to feel lethal in the lab.”

I smile and sit next to him. “Thank you for making coffee.”

“Rowan said the sunrise here is magical.”

“It is, although I rarely get to see it.”

“Really? Why?”

“Go to bed too late.”

He takes in a deep breath, closing his eyes and leaning back on the bench. “If I had this on my doorstep, I’d be out here every morning.”

If he were mine, I’d be out here every morning with him too, which is a too-dangerous thought to have when we’re in this in-between time when anything seems possible.

“Can I ask you a question about HelixGen?” he asks, catching me off guard. He’d seemed interested about it when we were in town days ago, but he hasn’t mentioned it since.

“Shoot.”

“Does it scare you?” he asks. “That another company might try to do what HelixGen did and succeed? That someone will come and change things?”

I gaze out at the valley. At the light beginning to shine at the edges of the mountains.

“That’s the fear everyone has in every good place. That someone will find it and want to own it. That the thing that makes it worth finding will be exactly the thing they destroy by finding it.” I wrap my hands tighter around my mug and take a fortifying sip. “Sometimes that change is good. New people come, new things happen, the town becomes something slightly different and the difference is worth it.” I take a breath, then conclude, “Sometimes it isn’t because what you lose is something you can’t get back.”

Silas is quiet and I think about how much my routine has changed since he got here.