Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
I wince. Deserved.
“Anyway,” I say. “Patch applied. Mostly.”
She stares at me like she’s seeing an entirely different person layered over the one she’s known.
Part of me wants to tell her to stop. To go back to the cartoon version where I’m all clean edges and no bugs.
“I had this whole narrative,” she says slowly, “where you were just… born cool. Broody kid genius with tragic cheekbones, emerging fully formed to brood on our sofa and ignore my jokes.”
I snort. “Tragic cheekbones?”
“Shut up.” Her mouth twitches. “I didn’t realize how hard you fought not to go the other way.”
“It wasn’t some noble crusade,” I say. “I just didn’t want your dad to stop letting me in the house.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “That’s what you think.”
Her tone makes something in my chest twist.
I deflect.
“Your turn,” I say gruffly. “Patch note.”
She taps the pen against her lip, thinking.
“Okay,” she says after a moment. “Lark v3.5 bug fix: three years ago, I started going to therapy, and I didn’t tell anyone.”
That… I did not know.
Not even a little.
“You?” I blurt. “Talking about your feelings voluntarily?”
She gives me a look. “I would kick you, but my therapist says that’s ‘regressing.’”
“Why?” I ask, before I remember my one-question rule.
She smiles faintly. “Wow. Didn’t even pretend to think of another question.”
I gesture for her to answer anyway.
She shifts in her seat, pulling one knee up to her chest.
“I had a panic attack,” she says quietly. “At work. It was… not cute. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see straight, convinced I was dying. HR wanted me to take time off. I convinced them not to. Went home and cried in the shower like a cliché.”
I blink at her.
“I hated it,” she says. “The feeling. The helplessness. The fact that my own brain turned on me. So I found a sliding-scale counselor and showed up. Told her everything. She told me my amygdala is a drama queen and gave me homework.”
“Did it help?” I ask.
“A lot,” she says. “Not overnight. But… enough that I don’t feel like I’m constantly one glitch away from blue-screening.”
She flicks the pen cap toward me, and it hits my chest.
“You know what the worst part was?” she adds.
“What?”
“I kept wanting to text you,” she admits. “Like, hey, the coding drama queen in my brain is DDoS-ing my nervous system, please patch? But you were… you. Busy. Distant. Wrapped in your own storms. And I convinced myself I didn’t get to ask for that.”
A quiet, sharp guilt slices through me.
I had no idea she almost reached out.
I would’ve… what? Told her to breathe? Sat on the phone with her all night, talking about stupid movies? Written her an anxiety-tracking script and hidden in the doorway while she cried?
I don’t know.
I should’ve made space to find out.
“Next,” she says, maybe sensing where my thoughts are going. “Your patch note.”
I roll the pen between my fingers. The urge to retreat into sarcasm is strong.
Instead, I go with something that feels like handing her a piece of my source code.
“Knight v3.1 critical bug report,” I say. “I don’t know what to do if you stop… seeing me the way you do.”
She blinks. “What?”
“You say you’ve had a crush on me forever,” I continue, staring at the notebook instead of her. “You look at me like I’m some… cool, collected vigilante who has his shit together and knows what he’s doing.”
“You are cool,” she protests.
“I learned to hack credit cards at fourteen because I wanted to eat,” I snap, then force my voice back down. “I barely graduated. I screw up more missions than I’ll admit to. I’ve ghosted people who cared about me because it was easier than telling them they should run.”
I take a breath.
“I like you,” I say, the words heavier than they sound. “More than I should. More than I know how to handle. But there’s a part of my brain convinced that once you see the whole ugly picture, the… non-heroic parts, you’re going to realize you built a pedestal out of fumes and bail.”
Silence.
My tongue feels thick.
“That was… more than one patch note,” I mutter.
She doesn’t say anything.
I risk a glance up.
Her eyes are bright. Not crying, exactly. Just… full.
“Knight,” she says slowly, “do you really think the way I see you is that shallow?”
“I think you fell for an idea,” I say. “And I don’t know how to live up to it.”
She sets the notebook down.
Gets up.
Walks around the table to stand in front of me.
I freeze.
She reaches up and pokes a finger into my chest, right above my heart.
“Newsflash, dumbass,” she says, voice shaking just a little. “I don’t like you because you look cool in a hoodie and can yell at routers until they behave. I like you because you showed up. Over and over. For my brother. For me. For people who didn’t even know you were saving them.”