Ivy woke to gray morning light filtering through the curtains and the strange, disorienting silence of a room without the usual electronic hum — no charging cables blinking, no phone alarm, nothing but the settling creak of old timber and, somewhere close, the steady sound of Lex's breathing.
She'd fallen asleep sitting up against his shoulder sometime after midnight, she realized, both of them still fully dressed, the flashlight long since died out on the nightstand between their beds. He was awake already when she stirred, watching her with an expression too soft for the early hour, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the strange intimacy of having woken up together — nothing more than that, exactly as promised, but still more than either of them had planned for — set
