Chapter Text
By 2:15 am, the world is silent. In the beginning, that used to be something Tessa could appreciate about her...affliction. There was something almost romantic about wandering the empty streets at night, the silence and the emptiness taking on a dreamy sort of unreality, where the world felt unguarded and open to any possibility. The cool night air kissing her hello as she stepped outside her front door; glowing fireflies and crickets chirping in the distance; the golden haze of streetlamps pouring down onto the dew-damp pavement as she roamed through the winding streets. Those kinds of things were easy for Tessa to romanticize, in the beginning.
Her bed used to be comfortable then too. In the beginning. Now, wide-awake once again to see her alarm clock tick forward to 2:16, there’s not a single comfort that Tessa can find in her bed. Her nighttime routine - changing into her most well-worn sleep clothes, doing her skincare and brushing her teeth, adjusting her multitude of pillows, and ultimately sinking down into her mattress - all of it is only an exercise in disappointment now, in putting off the inevitable. She should feel welcome in her bed, but every night, Tessa just feels trapped. Dread curdles in her stomach as soon as she lies down, trying to relax but knowing she has nothing but another sleepless night to get through.
No matter how exhausted her body is, no matter how many miles she runs or Pilates classes she subjects herself to in a day, it’s Tessa’s mind that will always be louder than the world around her.
So she doesn’t sleep much anymore. That’s something Tessa is beginning to come to terms with.
Staring up at her ceiling, Tessa can feel the same frustration she battles every night beginning to rise toward the surface, pricking tears in her eyes, but she resolutely ignores the feeling. With a deep sigh, Tessa surrenders any hope of catching a few hours of rest tonight and climbs out from her tangle of sheets. If she can’t sleep, she might as well get something else done.
* * *
The fluorescent lights are blinding as always when she finally arrives at the laundromat. Normally their obtrusive brightness would be headache inducing, but Tessa has gotten rather used to them now. It’s certainly not her first trip to this particular laundromat after three in the morning. The simple corner store was one of the first silent, empty places she found during her late night wanderings; a 24-hour refuge where she could wait out the long hours until morning.
Well, the laundromat is usually silent and empty. Pausing inside the front door, the weight of her laundry basket heavy on her hip, Tessa frowns as she’s greeted by the mechanical whir of several washing machines, clearly in use. By the pitch, she can tell they’re just starting the wash cycle. Tessa peers warily around the laundromat, but doesn’t see anyone else present at the moment. Whoever it is will probably be back later once their stuff is done. At least she won’t have to make any small talk in the meantime, she thinks. Turning down the far left aisle, Tessa just hopes that the person didn’t take...
Her favorite machine. Of course it’s already running. Stopping short in front of number seventeen, with its seven sticker halfway peeling off the white metal, Tessa glares at the mesmerizing whirl of someone else’s coloreds as if the clothes have personally wronged her. Seventeen is the only machine that operates with one quarter less than the others, it’s her lucky machine, she’s awake well on the ugly side of midnight, and someone has taken her favorite machine.
Tessa sighs, irritated, and stomps further down the row, putting some distance between her and whoever has encroached on her late night laundry routine. She loads her soap and softener, jams all the stupid quarters into the machine - including the extra one - and watches the barrel start to fill with water, arms crossed over her chest. It’s not until she’s loading her darks into the washer - perhaps a little more aggressively than is strictly necessary - that Tessa finally spots him out of the corner of her eye. Turns out she’s not the only person in the building after all. Down the row, parked in the far corner, a man is slumped down into one of the rolling baskets provided by the laundromat, his legs dangling over the side, neck bent at a distinctly uncomfortable-looking angle, apparently fast asleep.
So this is the culprit.
Tossing in her last pair of underwear and a lone blue sock, Tessa closes the lid of the machine and marches over to the guy. Usually she’s not one to socialize with any other late night vagrants unless she has to, but Tessa’s now one quarter short of being able to finish both loads of her laundry, and she’s got a bone to pick.
She stops in front of him and drops her empty basket onto the floor with a loud clatter. He starts awake in a comically abrupt fashion, limbs jerking in the air as he lurches up, almost upsetting his rolling bed in the process. Tessa can’t discern much about him given how he’s folded himself into the cart, but he seems to be about her age, with brown hair sticking up in every direction and dark circles under his eyes that could probably rival her own.
“What the -” the man exclaims.
“You owe me a quarter,” Tessa interrupts coolly.
The man glances nervously around the entire laundromat, eyes wide with momentary panic and confusion, before his gaze finally lands on Tessa. He blinks up at her for a long moment, then his face settles into a deep scowl.
“Excuse me?” he scoffs at her.
Tessa points down the length of the row behind them. “Seventeen is my machine,” she says. “It runs even if you only put five quarters in instead of six like the others, and you took it, so now I don’t have enough change to do my second load.”
The guy gapes at her. Still seated in the basket, he raises his hands, palms up like he’s trying to defend himself. “Hey, lady, I just took a random machine. No one else was here, and I didn’t see any names on these things,” he says. “And I put six quarters in just like the sticker said.”
“Well,” Tessa laughs at him. “That’s your own mistake. You wasted a quarter.”
He’s staring at her again, like he honestly can’t believe that he’s being confronted over a quarter at a laundromat at 3:30 in the morning. “Well,” he parrots back. “I’ll remember that in the future. Thanks for the tip.”
With a note of haughty finality, he settles back into the rolling basket, making himself comfortable again. He tilts his head back against the edge and shuts his eyes, apparently content to go on ignoring Tessa’s presence entirely.
Turning on her heel, Tessa returns to her own laundry, intent on doing the same.
By the time she’s seated herself on top of a dryer next to her pile of whites and pulled out her book, however, all the fight has drained out of Tessa. Prickly embarrassment sets in almost immediately after, as she thinks about the production she just made. She was so quick to go after the poor guy, and definitely too sharp with him. She’s just so tired. She would never treat a stranger like that in the light of day, but Tessa hasn’t slept for longer than three hours in the last week, and it’s clearly starting to show.
She sets the book aside to rest her elbows on her knees for a long minute, pressing her palms against her eyelids until she sees fireworks. The feeling of defeat is heavy on her shoulders, and suddenly Tessa’s fighting back tears once again. Why can’t she just sleep?
She doesn’t know how much time passes, but she eventually pulls herself together and forces her aching eyes to focus on the words on the page. The monotonous white noise of the washing machines should be enough to relax her, but instead Tessa just feels tense and vaguely unstable, like her body is oversensitive to every stimulus coming at her. She tries desperately to tune in to the book and mostly fails. She can’t stop thinking that she should go apologize.
The squeak of rusty wheels slowly approaching her is what finally draws Tessa’s attention again. Looking up, she sees the guy, still seated in the basket, his legs stretched down to the floor as he attempts to push the cart down the row with his tiptoes. Instead of staring vacantly at the pages of the book in her lap, she watches him struggle to steer the cart in her direction for a seemingly infinite stretch of time. When he finally reaches where Tessa is sitting, he brings the cart to a stop and settles in again, faux-casual, like she didn’t just bear witness to his entire squeaky journey to her end of the laundromat. He folds his hands across his stomach, elbows resting on opposite edges of the basket.
“So,” he says, clearing his throat. “Do you come here often, or do you just have a psychic affinity for cost-effective wash machines?”
Tessa almost laughs. She rolls her eyes and looks back down at her book. “It’s my superpower,” she replies dryly.
He nods, fully accepting of her answer. There’s another long pause before he says, “You receiving any messages from the dryers by any chance?”
A slow smile begins to turn up at the corner of her mouth.
That’s how Tessa meets Scott Moir. In the middle of a sleepless night, on a Wednesday, at a laundromat.
* * *
“I don’t sleep,” Tessa confesses to him, later.
Scott doesn’t sleep much either.
It takes a while for her to trust him. Not because she doesn’t believe him, it’s just that Tessa has never forgotten the speech her mother gave her after she accidentally let it it slip she goes out onto the streets at night when she can’t sleep. Tessa’s not a naturally suspicious person, but she knows how to keep herself safe, and she also knows better than to let her guard down around a man she doesn’t know well, especially when she’s alone after dark. That’s just the way the world is. Scott seems to understand this. He doesn’t take it personally.
Tessa can imagine the words her mother would have for her now, if Kate knew she was purposefully going out at all hours of the night with some strange man from the laundromat.
“It’s not safe.” Tessa can hear her mother’s words in her mind without even having to hear them in person. “You’re putting yourself in a vulnerable position, Tessa. He could do anything to you, when no one’s around to intervene.”
But it’s not like that.
When she can’t sleep and she wants to escape the four walls of her bedroom, Tessa texts him, if he hasn’t already texted her first. More often than not, by the time she gives up on sleep and gives in to checking her phone, there’s already a message waiting for her.
Saturday, June 9, 1:52 am: i hope you’re sleeping. if not, i’m heading to lava java
Tuesday, June 26, 3:06 am: i’m at prentiss park if you’re awake. but i hope you’re not
Monday, July 18, 12:48 am: sweet dreams, tess. meet me at the usual spot if you want
In the beginning, Tessa sticks to the public places where there’s likely to other people around. They take walks around the well-lit parts of town, nodding in greeting at the odd night jogger and the late shift workers passing by on their way home. They meet up at the 24-hour coffeeshop and always share the same booth, legs propped up on the other’s bench, a cup of decaf sludge for Scott and a cinnamon tea with soymilk for Tessa. The silence they share is companionable.
Before, Tessa never felt particularly lonely when she laid awake at night by herself, staring up at her ceiling, praying that she’d fall asleep. She never once wished someone else was there with her, because they’d just grow tired of her tossing and turning anyway. Tessa knows that insomnia is not an experience that’s meant to be shared. It’s isolating in its torment, preying on you when the rest of the world is blissfully unable to care, deep in the depths of sleep.
Insomnia is an inherently lonely experience, so Tessa never bothered to consider that her battle with it could be anything else. She’s learning to live with it differently now, however. Some nights, she ignores Scott’s texts, rolling away from the bright notification and just hoping for the best on her own. Some nights, her body is so debilitatingly exhausted that she couldn’t imagine getting up and moving, no matter how much she would like to not be lying there alone. Other nights though, they do meet up, and they talk, or they walk in silence, or do their laundry together like that very first time. And when Tessa is with Scott, the world doesn’t seem so silent and empty anymore. Because even if she’s stuck awake, she’s not alone, and that makes everything feel smaller, shrunk down to a more manageable size.
Tessa would never wish the experience they share on anyone, especially not someone like Scott, but selfishly, Tessa is glad she has him to be awake with.
Tonight, Tessa is trying to focus on anything other than the hours of sleep she’s losing to the backs of her eyelids when her chirpy ringtone breaks open the silence of her bedroom. Her reflexes are so dulled by exhaustion that Tessa doesn’t even flinch, just reaches blindly for her phone on the bedside table. She squints at the screen. It’s Scott, of course, his contact picture - a goofy shot of him doing the tree pose next to a maple tree - greeting her in the darkness.
A phone call from Scott is new. Not necessarily a bad thing, Tessa decides, she just hopes nothing is wrong. She swipes at the screen to answer.
“Hello?” Tessa can hear the hoarseness of her own voice through the speaker, having gone unused since she crawled into bed five hours ago.
“Hey Tess, sorry,” Scott begins, rushed, sounding immediately regretful. “I shouldn’t have even called, god. I’m sorry if -”
“It’s okay,” Tess tells him. “I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
A beat of silence, and on the other end of the line, she can hear Scott let out a long breath full of...something. Tessa tucks the phone more comfortably between her pillow and her cheek, closer.
“Yeah,” he responds quietly. “Me neither.”
Quite often, the comfort is as simple as that.
* * *
Tessa acknowledges she finds Scott attractive around the same time the weather starts to change, bringing nights that are too cold to spend outside. Their nightly exchanges quickly turn into a series of come over’s and no it’s too cold, i don’t want to leave. you come over’s. By October, Tessa realizes Scott is spending half the nights of the week at her place. She doesn’t really know what to think about that. Mostly she’s just grateful he’s not there long often enough for her neighbors to start asking questions. Tessa is acutely aware that if Ms. Carmichael were actually awake to peer out her window and see Scott arriving in the early hours of the morning, Tessa would have a very different reputation in her neighborhood.
It’s not like that between them though. Scott never stays the night; usually he’s gone before the sun has even started to rise. Tessa is fairly certain he’s never so much as touched her bed. He’s not there to sleep, after all - that’s the whole point of their weird, symbiotic relationship. While Tessa is well acquainted with the other activities that could involve her bed, she does her best not think about those things in relation to Scott. It’s not like that.
Tessa has a nice kitchen, so they spend a lot of their time there. When the late night hunger pangs set in, they make toast and eggs and argue about the best hot sauce accompaniment. They frost pumpkin-shaped sugar cookies for Halloween and stain their fingertips orange with food coloring that doesn’t wash out for days. After the law changes, just once, they make brownies together and get stoned on her living room floor. That’s maybe the one and only time they ever actually sleep in each other’s presence.
They don’t drink when they can’t sleep, for the same reason neither one of them uses medication to help with insomnia. It’s not a solution - just a bad path to start down, and one that is especially difficult to leave. It’s something they’ve discussed at length before. Conversations like that are what makes Tessa pause and simply savor how good it feels to have someone who can truly empathize with her struggles, who fundamentally understands all that she has to cope with. The realization, when it comes, should not feel as profound as it does.
She likes Scott, more than she probably should, in the same true and fundamental way they’ve understood each other from the very beginning, before they really knew each other at all. It’s an expansive feeling, one she has yet to find the bounds of, and one that Tessa refuses to put a label on. All she really wants is to keep Scott at her side, and that seems to be a place he’s more than willing to stay.
It’s Saturday morning, well after four am, and they’re sitting out on her back patio, wrapped up in blankets on the old outdoor furniture Tessa got secondhand from Jordan. The weather took a happy turn back toward mild for the weekend, and they mutually decided to take advantage of what will likely be the last pleasant night of the year. It’s still a little too cold for just socks, however, an amateur mistake on Tessa’s part. She works on nestling her icy toes under Scott’s calves on the footrest they’re sharing.
Scott doesn’t protest. He’s been quiet all night, which is normally not one of Scott’s dominant traits. It’s not uncommon for them to just sit together in silence - sometimes the energy just isn’t there - but tonight doesn’t feel like one of those nights. Tessa’s uncertain about whether she should push him on whatever seems to be troubling him. Usually he’ll come to her on his own, whenever he’s ready.
While she waits for that time to arrive, however, Tessa decides to start with something easier, a question they often find themselves asking each other. A sort of check-in they’ve gotten into the habit of using, equivalent to dipping your toes into water, to test the temperature of the conversation. Glancing in his direction, Tessa asks quietly, “What are you thinking about right now?”
The wicker furniture creaks as Scott shifts in position, wrapping the checkered throw more carefully around his shoulders. He tucks his nose into the folds of the blanket. He doesn’t answer the question right away, and the silence stretches on so long that Tessa isn’t sure he actually heard her.
Then his gaze finds hers in the darkness. “Do you want the honest answer?” Scott says.
Tessa nods, wide eyes not leaving his. “Of course,” she answers, her conviction genuine. She will always want to hear what Scott has to say.
Scott chuckles, a small sound. He replies, “I’ve been wondering what you look like in the daylight.”
Tessa is taken aback by his answer, though it shouldn’t throw her as much as it does. Tessa’s never really considered the fact that they only see each other at night. Objectively she knows their relationship is strange, but the way they are just feels normal to her now; it’s how they’ve always been. And honestly, Tessa wasn’t sure that anything outside the early morning hours was even an option. Maybe she should’ve asked him.
Something shifts then, and that’s when Tessa makes up her mind. “We should fix that,” she tells him.
Scott lets his head fall against the back of the loveseat, turning to look in her direction. “You think so?” he says. It’s hard to see in the dark, but Tessa knows there’s a small smile toying at his iips, just by the sound of his voice.
“Yeah,” Tessa says, more definitively. “Yeah, for sure.”
Scott nods once. “Okay.”
They don’t talk about it again for the rest of the night. It’s only hours later, when the bottom of the sky is beginning to lighten, dawn approaching slowly then all at once, that Scott speaks up again.
“I should go,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t make any effort to get up.
Tessa, who had been drifting in and out of a barely-there sleep against the armrest of her chair, blinks back into awareness. As she dozed, she’d been thinking about what Scott will look like in the light of day, how bright he’ll seem to her, when he already shines even in the dark. In the end, she doesn’t know why she says it. Then again, maybe she does.
“You don’t have to.”
When he looks over at her, she watches him back, and Tessa can see the moment he decides to stay.
She takes his hand after they’ve gathered the blankets up from the furniture. She doesn’t let it go. Together, they turn off the lights in the kitchen. They don’t change out of the clothes they’re wearing, just push back the covers on each side of her bed and carefully climb in. They move in close together. When Scott hesitates, Tessa reaches behind herself to take his hand, guiding it gently across her waist, as if it to say I’m here, this is okay. She holds his hand near her collarbone, their fingers intertwined.
Tessa can feel it when Scott finally allows himself to have this. Slowly, the tension in his body that’s kept him distant all night begins to unwind, every part of him relaxing against her. His arm folds her in even closer to his chest, holding her in return with a firm tenderness that makes Tessa’s heart beat harder against her ribcage. She knows he can feel it too, where their hands are joined under her chin. Scott tucks his cheek against the back of her neck, next to the fall of her ponytail. He breathes in deeply, and Tessa feels his eyelashes flutter closed against her bare skin.
Turning her head, Tessa presses a single kiss to the soft part of his hand, where his thumb and forefinger join together.
Tessa and Scott don’t sleep. But for once, that seems okay.
* * *
They decide to meet again for the first time at the golden hour, because it seems fittingly overdramatic for such a ridiculous occasion. They also agree to go to dinner dressed up in the very best outfits they own, because a conversation about them both in uppity formal wear almost had them sick with laughter one night, months ago. Neither one of them says that it’s a date, but that seems like an agreed upon fact without either of them having to mention it out loud.
From the very back of her closet, Tessa produces the glitziest floor length dress she has, something she wore once for a work event. She can admit that the pattern of gold embellishments is very flattering, even if the dress is entirely too over the top for what the situation calls for. Tessa wonders if Scott will like it - she hopes he will. She wonders what he’ll be wearing.
Over her dress, Tessa puts on an oversized black faux-fur jacket that carefully toes the line between ugly and elegant, deciding it’ll be just enough to protect her from the cold on the walk between her car and the restaurant. Gathering up her things, trying to breathe her racing heart back into a normal rhythm, Tessa heads out her front door.
The restaurant was one of Scott’s suggestions, somewhere she’d never been before, so Tessa feels like she should’ve guessed beforehand that it would have something like a grandiose set of marble stairs leading up to the front entrance. That’s probably the exact reason Scott picked it, just so they’d look even more ridiculous. People do seem to be giving Tessa the side-eye as she waits at the base of the steps, decked out in a glorified prom dress. She tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear shyly, but smiles to herself.
Around her, the windows of the buildings are reflecting the rose gold brilliance of the sky, amplifying the soft warmth of the golden light, and that’s when Tessa finally spots Scott, hurrying in her direction from further down the street. He waves at her excitedly. Tessa grins.
They’ve only ever seen each other in the kind of mismatched comfy clothes one reserves for wasting the night away, so seeing Scott now is a 180-degree turn. He looks handsome in his tux - complete with a bow tie and pocket square - and his getup makes Tessa feel like she maybe isn’t so overdressed after all. They’re a matched set.
Scott’s out of breath when he finally reaches her, dashing up the first five stairs to where she’s waiting in two long strides. He slows down as he approaches her though, taking all of her in from top to bottom, her dress and her earrings and her eyes all twinkling in the light of the golden hour. Tessa can’t seem to hold back her laughter as she folds out her arms, making a little ta-da motion.
“Wow,” Scott breathes. He steps in closer than ever and takes her hand.
His eyes roam across her face, as if memorizing every new detail he can see. Tessa’s eyes sweep across every part of his face in return, appreciating how the sun highlights the color of his eyes, the lines of his jaw, the texture of his hair as it falls in messy waves. Then, after a long moment of just seeing, Tessa carefully reaches up and presses her palm to his cheek. She lightly traces the dark circle under his left eye with her thumb. Still the same Scott.
“Hi,” Tessa whispers back, then lets her hand fall back to her side.
Scott reaches for it right away, clasping their palms together. He grins. “It’s nice to see you,” he says, and gestures vaguely around them. “Here in all this light.”
Tessa laughs, loud and unabashed. “Yeah, you too.”
They just stare at each other dopily for another minute before Tessa comes to her senses. “Should we head inside?” she asks gently.
That seems to jumpstart Scott back into motion. “Oh!” he says. “You’ve got to open this first.”
Unbuttoning his jacket and reaching inside the inner pocket, he produces a small box with a white ribbon tied around it. He holds it out to her on an open palm.
“Are we getting engaged?” Tessa quips, eyebrows raising. She feels safe in the joke, because it’s clearly not a ring box, and also because she knows Scott better than that.
Not that Tessa would necessarily say no if he asked. Just...she’d like to kiss him first.
“Not yet,” Scott laughs off the remark. Tessa doesn’t miss the inherent assumption in his answer though, and her heart starts to beat a little faster. “But I did get a gift for you.”
Tessa groans. “Scott,” she scolds, “You should’ve said so! I would’ve gotten you something -”
Scott laughs again, waving away her commentary. “Trust me, it didn’t cost much.”
Tessa eyes both him and the box warily.
“Just open it!” he insists, shaking it a little. It rattles in his hand.
Gingerly, Tessa picks up the box and unties the delicate ribbon, feeling Scott’s eyes on her the whole time. She tucks the lid against the bottom of the box. Inside, there are two layers of gauzy material, and between the decorative padding, Tessa finds a single, shiny quarter.
A long-forgotten debt finally repaid; one that had already been repaid in so many more important ways.
Tessa feels her lips part in surprise at the sight of it, the memory rushing back to her all at once. She jerks her head up to look at Scott. It’s as ridiculous as her in a ball gown and Scott with a pocket square, but she actually feels tears spring to her eyes. The difference between how she felt that night and how she feels now is suddenly so evident it almost aches: how alone Tessa was all those months ago, exhausted, just trying to fill up the emptiness of a sleepless night, and now, as she stands in front of Scott, tired, but feeling more whole in the light of the setting sun than she has in a long time.
Scott doesn’t see the emotion welling up in her eyes, just the shock written across Tessa’s face at the sight of a long-lost quarter. He’s near laughter, delighted in having gifted her with all of twenty-five cents, unaware of the meaning Tessa now understands, hidden within a single coin that somehow brought them together. So Tessa shuts him up with a kiss.
Golden sunlight shines all around them, and Scott kisses Tessa back.
* * *
He doesn’t text her as often anymore, but that’s to be expected now that he’s all but moved into her place.
When Tessa blinks awake, she looks to her alarm clock. She’d slept for over two and a half hours. Even after all this time, a few hours still feels like a victory. Every little bit helps.
Rolling over, Tessa shifts closer to the middle of the bed, hoping she can cash in another hour at least. Reaching toward the opposite side, seeking out the warmth of his arms, Tessa’s hand finds only cool bedsheets. Tessa opens her eyes again.
They know better than to encroach on any brief snatches of rest the other can find, but some part of Tessa will always be a little sad when he doesn’t wake her up when he needs her. She knows Scott feels the same, always coming to find her if she slips out of their bed on a bad night, even though she just wants to let him sleep peacefully. It’s something they’re working on.
Today though, it’s 5:57 on a Saturday morning according to the glow of Tessa’s alarm clock, and without a full day of work ahead to consider, Tessa lets herself have the morning.
She finds him out on the patio, a mug of fresh coffee in his hand, watching the swirling patterns of steam rise and evaporate into the air. The world is warming up again, shaking off the grip of a cold spring. The morning is comfortable and calm, without the stagnant humidity that will set in by the afternoon.
Scott is already aware of her presence, having heard the sliding door open and close as she stepped outside, but Tessa still traces her palm across his shoulders as she rounds the wicker loveseat. Just to feel the steadiness of him, to let him know she’s there.
She sits down next to him, tucking her feet up under her and settling in close. She presses a kiss to the side of his neck, just checking in, before resting her head against his shoulder. Scott wraps his arm around her shoulders, hugging her to him.
The world around them is waking up, birds singing in the distance, pale light beginning to pinken the night sky to the east as they simply hold each other, easing into the comfortable silence they’ve always shared.
Scott is the first to speak. “What are you thinking about right now?” he asks quietly, voice rough and sleepy but warm. Always warm.
Tessa hums. In reality, she’d been thinking about telling Scott she loves him. But Tessa decides those words are for another night. “I’m thinking I’d like to watch the sunrise with you,” she says instead.
Scott smiles down at her, like he knows what she wanted to say anyway. He presses a kiss to her temple. “Okay.”
And that feels a lot like an answer.
Together, they watch the sun rise.