Chapter 4

Evan sat across from me at dinner the way he always did.

"Eat."

He pushed an open can of Spam toward me.

I didn't touch it.

Evan looked up at me.

I gave him a small smile. "Evan, you're good to me because of my dad, aren't you?"

Evan froze.

"Everybody says so. Richard saved your life, so you're paying it back." My voice stayed level. "You don't have to. I'm worth something here on my own.

"I scout, I question people, I screen new arrivals, I call danger early. Nobody else can do that. You don't have to force yourself over my father."

I paused.

"You don't have to force yourself into being my boyfriend either."

Evan was silent.

He stayed quiet for a long time.

Then his thoughts drifted over.

'So useless.'

He thought I was useless.

My whole body locked up, and I couldn't lift my eyes to him.

I pushed the can back across the table. "You eat it. Stop saving things for me."

I stood up and left.

I kept walking until I was sure I couldn't hear him anymore.

That was for the best.

I didn't want to hear any more of it.

James Carter came back with a perimeter search team.

Team Two was clearing the ruins on the west side of the city when they found a survivor camp.

Seven people were starved down to bone. One young man stepped forward on his own, with a gentle voice and clear eyes.

"I'm a doctor," he said. "I was one before, and I still am. If your Haven needs medical staff, I can work."

I ran the routine screening when they brought him in.

I walked into the interrogation room, and the man in front of me looked up.

"Claire?"

I froze.

It was James Carter.

The James who lived next door to me before the apocalypse. The James I grew up with. The James who was still drilling me on math the night before my exams.

He was four years older than me, and after he graduated, he moved to another city for work.

I'd thought he was dead.

It had been three years.

"Claire, you've gotten so thin." James stood up. His voice was as gentle as it had been on those walks home from school. "You've had a hard time of it, haven't you?"

I couldn't hold it.

I broke down in tears.

Three years of apocalypse. I'd killed mutant beasts, broken traitors, dug supplies out from under bodies, and listened to more minds than I could count. I had never cried once.

James said one sentence about how hard it had been, and the tears came straight down.

Nobody had used that tone with me since my father died.

Evan never did.

He would leave a ration bar in front of me and walk away.

The rest of the Haven couldn't even look at me straight. Nobody trusted a woman who heard everything.

James was different because he knew me from before. In his head, I wasn't the terrifying mind reader. I was the girl next door with a ponytail who smiled too much and was hopeless at math.

He wasn't afraid of me.

James reached out and patted my shoulder. "Hey. What's with the tears?"

I cried harder.

I wasn't being dramatic. It hit me all at once that being comforted could be this simple.

No need to ask the same thing seventeen times, no need to grill them like a suspect, no need to make them kiss me just so they'd finally stop talking.

Some people were born knowing how to say the right thing.

I wiped my face and punched his arm. "I thought you were dead, you know that?"

James laughed, and his thoughts were laughing too. 'It's good to be alive. She still cries as easily as ever.'

His mind was warm and open, nothing like the guarded ones all around me.

I didn't notice the figure at the end of the hallway.

I heard him, though.

He thought, 'All good.'

What was good about it?

I thought it over.

It probably meant this. Someone who could actually talk to me was keeping me company, and that was all good.

He didn't have to carry the annoying dead weight anymore.

All good.

Yes. All good.

James settled into the Haven fast.

He was a good doctor. He'd been a surgical resident before the apocalypse, and afterward, he woke up with a healing ability that closed a wound faster when he touched it.

He wasn't a fighter, but in the Haven, he was a treasure.

What mattered more was that he knew how to talk.

He was unusually good at it.

Working on a wound, he'd say, "Hang on, almost done."

Giving a kid a shot, he'd say, "You're the bravest one here, aren't you?"

Passing the women in the growing beds, he'd say, "Those tomatoes look great today. So do you."

The women grinned all afternoon.

He found out I could read minds and never cared.

"Listen all you want," he said, grinning. "What's in my head is what comes out of my mouth. I've got nothing to hide."

Out of three hundred people, he was the only one besides Evan who never put a guard up around me.

Talking to him was easy. We'd grown up together, so there was no end to it.