Chapter 3
“Like meeting,” Bryce said, dropping his voice below the threshold of professional broadcast, not caring that three million people were listening to the unmasking of his heart. “Like me driving out to wherever you’re hiding, picking you up, and bringing you back into the sun. Eighty-four days is enough, Miles. You’ve let me inside your head. Now let me see your face.”
A tiny, sharp breath hitched in Miles’s throat. “My face isn't what it used to be, Bryce. I told you. The scars... the glass did terrible things.”
“I don’t care about scars,” Bryce said fiercely, entirely convinced of his own nobility. “I care about the soul that lives behind that voice. The soul that gave me back my life when I thought I was buried in that reservoir with Julian. I love you, Miles. I don't care what the world thinks of an on-air confession. I love you, and I’m going to protect you.”
The silence that followed was different this time.
It wasn't the tentative stillness of a frightened invalid. For a fraction of a second, the atmospheric noise on the line flattened—a clean, pristine dead space that lacked the natural hum of an analog telephone microphone.
Then, Miles spoke. His voice was lower, stripped of its previous tremulous hesitation, possessing an eerie, crystalline clarity that bypassed the studio’s compressors entirely.
“Eighty-four days,” Miles repeated softly. “And you’ve loved every single second of playing the savior, haven't you?”
Before Bryce could parse the odd phrasing, Miles let out a soft, melodic hum that felt breathtakingly familiar—a habit Julian used to have when he was pleased with an acoustic cut.
“All right, Bryce,” Miles whispered, that silk-wrapped warmth rushing back in to soothe away the momentary chill. “Let’s make a deal. Not tonight. But soon. On our hundredth night. Exactly sixteen broadcasts from now.”
Bryce’s heart leaped into his throat. “The hundredth night?”
“A hundred is a complete number,” Miles reasoned, his voice dipping into an intoxicating, conspiratorial purr. “A century of nights. If you still want me then... if you can answer every question I have about how to survive the dark without flinching... I’ll let you come to me. I’ll let you take me home.”
“I can answer anything,” Bryce promised immediately, a triumphant smile curving his lips. “I won’t flinch. I swear it, Miles.”
“Good,” Miles breathed, his voice fading back into that delicate, wounded whisper as the automated station bumpers began to bleed over the auxiliary feed. “Keep the lighthouse burning, Bryce. Because I’m swimming toward you. Faster than you think.”
The green light on Line 7 didn't cut out with a standard disconnect tone; it simply evaporated, returning the console to an indifferent black.
Bryce sat back in his ergonomic leather chair, running a trembling hand through his neatly combed hair. His shirt was damp with sweat at the small of his back, but his veins were singing with pure adrenaline.
Through the glass, Teresa slammed her clipboard down on the counter, grabbed her talkback mic, and yelled through the studio monitors: “Are you completely insane, Vance?! You just dropped an on-air romantic proposal on syndication! My Twitter feed is exploding! The network VP in Chicago is calling the hotline right now!”
Bryce didn't flinch. He reached out, casually turning down the talkback volume until Teresa’s frantic voice was reduced to a harmless buzz. He pulled off his heavy broadcast headphones, savoring the profound, ringing silence of the booth.
He looked down at his right hand—smooth, unmarked, free of any scars from broken glass or jagged lake timbers.
Sixteen days until the hundredth night. Sixteen days until he claimed his prize, proving to the world, to himself, and to Julian’s lingering shadow that Bryce Vance was the undisputed hero of his own tragic love story.
He reached over, tapped the mute switch, and whispered into the cold dark of the room:
“I’ll be waiting, Miles.”
The red ON AIR sign died with a hollow relay click, leaving Studio 4B bathed in the sickly amber wash of the desktop monitors.
Bryce sat motionless, his fingers still curved over the faders as if letting go would snap the invisible thread strung across the city. His pulse had not slowed. In his inner ear, the lingering echo of Miles’s voice hummed like low-voltage current—velvet, bruised, laced with that unbearable, breathless devotion.
The studio door swung open with a muffled hiss, breaking the spell.
Teresa stepped inside, holding a printout of the network’s live telemetry and an unlit vape between her knuckles. Her eyes were rimmed with charcoal liner that had begun to smudge into the creases of her eyelids. She stood over the console, staring down at Bryce with a look split evenly between managerial terror and profound disgust.
“Do you know what the aggregate board looks like right now?” she asked, dropping the paper onto Bryce’s soundboard. It fluttered against the gain knobs. “Seven hundred thousand social impressions in forty minutes. The affiliate in Denver cut the national weather feed just to broadcast the last five minutes of your call. You offered to drive out and collect an anonymous caller like you’re picking up a stray dog, Bryce. A *romantic* stray dog.”
Bryce didn’t look at the paper. He reached out, his thumb gently smoothing a corner that had curled over the Line 7 bus selector. “The numbers are up.”
“The numbers are through the concrete roof!” Teresa snapped, pacing toward the monitor rack. “That’s not the problem, and you know it. The problem is that Grafton FM is licensed as an educational and therapeutic night-talk frequency, not your personal Tinder line. Who is he, Bryce? For real. Has he sent you an email? A photo? A burner number?”
“He’s an agoraphobe recovering from massive physical and psychological trauma,” Bryce said, his voice measured, smooth, radiating the unshakeable patience that made listeners weep in their cars. “He doesn’t use email. You screen the calls, Teresa. You know his line is routed through an encrypted redirect.”
Teresa stopped pacing. Her jaw tightened, the vape clicking softly against her teeth. She walked back to the triple-pane glass, looking out into the darkened master control booth where the server racks stood like black monoliths behind green wire mesh.
“That’s the other thing,” she said quietly, her tone dropping out of anger into something dry and nervous. “Engineering flagged Line 7 tonight.”
Bryce finally glanced up, his brows knitting in faint irritation. “Flagged it for what?”
“Latency.”
“There is no latency. The audio is pristine.”
“That’s exactly what’s wrong with it,” Teresa said. She leaned over the console, tapping a finger against the master bus readout. “Every digital voice-over-IP call has jitter, Bryce. Cell towers drop packets. Fiber relays have millisecond micro-delays, especially through the multi-node proxy he’s supposed to be using to hide his location. But tonight, while you two were busy having phone sex on public airwaves, Marcus ran a trace down the trunk line.”
Bryce felt a subtle tightening beneath his sternum. “And?”
“It didn’t come through the regional Bell switchboard. It didn’t hit the telecom gateway at all.” Teresa leaned closer, her eyes fixing him with cold scrutiny. “The data packets for Line 7 didn’t originate from an outside cell tower. Marcus traced the direct digital audio stream to an internal patch.”
