(no subject)

The last textwave he got from Jordie said I'm going off-grid for a few weeks.

It's been close to a month, and Simon's looking through his inbound messages and wondering if he should write.

[Flashback. Sometime between the two later flashbacks in "Safe."]

He still can't get anywhere near River, but he has a lead now.

He goes through his workday as though everything is normal, and there are moments when he could almost believe that everything really is. That all of this is some paranoid fantasy, brought about by who knows what buried impulses.

He keeps one of River's letters in his pockets, the decoded version, for those moments.

Maybe he really is paranoid, as his mother's suggested. Maybe he's crazy. But he's not wrong.

Simon steps out of the hospital doors and moves briskly toward the sidewalk, bag in hand.