Present Day
Eliza
She heard him before she saw him.
Marcus's footsteps in the corridor had a rhythm she knew like her own heartbeat: quick, purposeful, still favoring his left leg a little from the motorcycle wreck two years back. But tonight the rhythm was off. Faster. Messier. The footsteps of a man who'd spent three weeks forcing himself to keep it together while he searched for something that felt impossible to find, and had just been told the impossible was standing right in front of him.
He shoved through the research room doors like a man who'd been holding his breath since November and just got permission to breathe again.
His hair stuck up in wild tufts where he'd been raking his fingers through it. His coat hung half buttoned, his shirt a wrinkled mess, the kind of look that
