Chapter Seventeen – Almost Normal
He knocked on the guest room door at nine forty-three.
I know because I had been watching the small clock on the bedside table for the past hour, tracking time the way you do when you're in an unfamiliar place and sleep has made itself unavailable and your thoughts are too loud for the size of the room.
"I'm going to the market," he said through the door. "You can come or stay. Either is fine."
I stared at the ceiling for exactly four seconds.
"Give me ten minutes," I said.
The market was three streets away.
It occupied a long cobblestoned square that the city had apparently decided to leave alone while everything around it modernized and expanded and lost its character. Stalls ran the length of it in two long rows — produce, bread, flowers, secondhand books, things made by hand that you didn't know you needed until you saw them. The smell hit first. Bread and coffee and something floral and underneath it all the cold clean bite of autumn air moving between buildings.
I stopped walking the moment we entered.
Hudson glanced back. "Okay?"
"Fine." I started walking again. "It's just—"
I didn't finish the sentence because I didn't know how to finish it honestly. It's just that I've been here before wasn't something I could say. Not accurately. Not in any way that made sense in the daylight, on a normal street, beside a normal man carrying a canvas bag.
But I had.
Not in memory. Not in this body, on this day. But in the way you recognize a place you've dreamed repeatedly — the specific angle of light between the stalls, the particular sound the cobblestones made under feet, the flower vendor on the left corner with the buckets of white dahlias that I somehow already knew would be there before I turned to look.
They were there.
I turned away before Hudson could see my face.
He moved through the market unhurried, stopping where things interested him, picking up vegetables with the focused attention of someone who actually cooked rather than someone performing the idea of cooking. He squeezed things. Smelled things. Asked the bread vendor a question about something I didn't catch and listened to the answer with genuine interest.
I trailed slightly behind, watching.
This was the thing about Hudson Ryan that I hadn't accounted for. He was easy. Not in the way that felt performed or calculated — in the way that certain people simply exist in the world without fighting it. Like the world had agreed to accommodate him and he'd had the grace not to abuse the arrangement.
I had never been easy. I fought everything. The world, people, my own feelings, my own face in the mirror on bad days.
Watching him be easy felt like watching someone breathe underwater.
"You're staring," he said without turning around.
"I'm observing," I corrected.
He laughed. Low and genuine, surprised out of him rather than performed. It did something to the morning air.
I looked away at the flower stall.
The white dahlias were close enough to touch. I reached out without thinking, fingertips brushing the outermost petals. Cool and soft and real. Undeniably, uncomplicatedly real.
"Do you like them?"
Hudson appeared beside me, canvas bag heavier now, looking at the flowers with mild curiosity.
"They're just flowers," I said.
"You were touching them like they were something else."
I pulled my hand back. "I've never bought flowers for myself," I said. The admission surprised me on the way out. Too honest. Too small and revealing.
He looked at me sideways. "Never?"
"Nobody buys flowers for themselves."
"I do," he said simply. He reached past me, selected three dahlias from the bucket, and paid the vendor before I could object. He held them out.
I looked at them. Then at him.
"That's—"
"Just flowers," he said. Echoing my own words back without mockery. Just gently. Just warmly.
I took them.
They were heavier than I expected.
We found a bench near the far end of the market where the crowd thinned and the noise softened to a manageable hum. Hudson produced two paper cups of coffee from somewhere — I hadn't even seen him buy them — and handed one over with the same unceremonious ease he applied to everything.
I held the cup in both hands and watched people move through the stalls.
Normal people. Living normal days. Choosing vegetables and arguing cheerfully about prices and chasing small children who had escaped toward the sweet vendor. The whole ordinary machinery of a Saturday morning operating exactly as it should.
It felt foreign. Like watching life through glass.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You can ask."
I smiled despite myself at the echo. "Do you always do that? Just— take in strangers?"
Hudson considered this seriously, which I appreciated. He didn't laugh it off or deflect with charm. He actually thought about it.
"No," he said.
"Then why me?"
He turned the coffee cup slowly in his hands. "You were in the road," he said. "Barefoot. It was raining two days before and the asphalt was still cold. You looked like—" he paused.
"Like what?"
He looked at me. "Like someone who had been trying to find their way back from somewhere very far away. And hadn't quite made it."
The bench was hard beneath me. The coffee was warm between my palms. The dahlias lay across my knees, white and quiet.
Something in my chest cracked along a line I hadn't known was there.
"I'm an orphan," I said.
I don't know why I said it. It arrived without permission, without strategy, without any of the careful management I usually applied to that particular fact. It just came out. Flat and plain and true.
Hudson didn't flinch. Didn't offer the expression people usually offered — that particular arrangement of features that combined pity and discomfort and relief that it wasn't them.
He just nodded. Once.
"I know what it's like," he said quietly, "to not have anywhere that feels like yours."
I looked at him.
"You're not an orphan," I said.
"No." His jaw tightened slightly. Just slightly. "But loss makes its own kind of homelessness."
He said it like someone reading from a map of a country they'd lived in too long. Like the knowledge was worn smooth from handling.
I didn't ask what he meant. Something told me the answer existed but wasn't ready yet — for him or for me.
We sat in the kind of silence that doesn't need filling. The market moved around us, indifferent and alive. A child ran past laughing, coat flying open, mother calling behind her. The flower vendor rearranged her buckets. Somewhere nearby someone was playing a guitar badly and with great enthusiasm.
I realized I was not thinking about the notebook.
I was not thinking about the well or the corridor or the pages that turned themselves or the shadow version of myself with sharp teeth and golden eyes.
I was just sitting on a bench in a market holding flowers nobody had ever bought me before, next to a man I didn't trust and couldn't stop watching, and for approximately four minutes I was just—
Here.
Present.
Breathing.
"Hudson."
"Mm."
"Thank you." I stared straight ahead. "Not for the flowers. For—" I gestured vaguely at the morning. At the coffee. At the bench. At the particular quality of the last hour.
He understood. I could tell he understood without looking at him.
"Don't thank me yet," he said lightly.
I laughed. Short and surprised and entirely genuine.
He smiled at the middle distance.
And I thought — dangerously, stupidly, with full awareness of my own foolishness — I could get used to this.
Which was exactly the problem.
Because somewhere behind his easy warmth and his genuine laugh and the flowers he bought without ceremony, something waited with the patience of a story that knew how it ended.
I just didn't remember writing it yet.
I held the dahlias a little tighter.
The market hummed around us.
And for four minutes and forty seconds I let myself have something I had never had before.
Almost normal.
Almost safe.
Almost his.