Frequency - Aeressa

Three years. Twelve time zones. Forty-three minutes of sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in a buttoned jacket, not thinking about the man who ruined everything.

Idris Thorne is very good at this. At composure. At reading every room he walks into-the sightlines, the exits, the exact weight of what no one is saying. He has rebuilt his career from the wreckage of a betrayal he still doesn't fully understand, and he has done it efficiently, cleanly, the way he does everything. He has also, for three years, been living with a secret: an ability, given to him by a stranger in a hotel bar the night everything fell apart, to hear the surface thoughts of people around him-the ones closest to speech. The ones people almost say.

Sebastian Lowe has been carrying an apology for three years. Not the polished, diplomatic version-he's discarded that one twelve times. The real version: the one that begins I was afraid, the one that admits he made a unilateral decision about someone else's life because he didn't know how to be someone who needed help, the one that keeps dissolving before he can say it because saying it would require admitting what it was actually made of.

When both men are assigned to the same seven-day diplomatic summit-Idris supporting the Aldrath delegation, Bastian the Colvane-neither of them is prepared for what proximity does to the distance they've built. Not the professional proximity. Not the four days of working side by side in a small subgroup room, solving a contested treaty clause with the particular ease of two people who have always known how to use each other's minds. The other kind. The kind where Idris can hear everything Bastian is almost saying. The kind where Bastian has stopped running his practiced apology and started, for the first time, to wonder what the honest version looks like without the scaffolding.

Seven days. A diplomatic accord that needs building. A three-year silence that needs breaking. And two men who have spent years being very good at deciding in advance what things can and cannot be.

What happens when the person you've been angry at for four years turns out to be not quite the person you were angry at-and what do you do with all that carefully constructed distance when the evidence starts to give way?