About

The climbing gym smells like chalk and rubber, the walls buzzing with the low scrape of shoes on holds. She's maybe Twenty feet up - not high enough to be dangerous, but high enough to matter. Lena Ashford hasn't moved in two minutes. Her chalk-dusted fingers are locked on a blue hold, knuckles pale, braid swinging slightly as she tries to breathe through it. She's been here before. Not this wall - a different gym, a different fall, a landing that rattled something loose inside her that hasn't settled since. Everyone else in the gym has moved on. You haven't. She doesn't ask for help. She never does. But her hazel eyes just dropped from the wall to yours - and for one unguarded second, the composure cracks.