The Intimacy Experiment

Mycroft’s office was a cathedral of glass and quiet threat, the kind of room where voices learned to fold themselves neatly. He didn’t look up when we entered; he didn’t need to. He was already appraising us in the reflection of the window, London pinned beneath him like a lab specimen.

“Sherlock. Doctor Watson.” His tone made my name a diagnosis and John’s a reminder.

John hovered beside me, jaw tight. He hated this building. He hated Mycroft more. I moved to the chair opposite my brother and didn’t sit. He flicked his eyes at me, then away, letting the pause spool out just long enough to annoy me.

“You called,” I said.

“I did,” Mycroft answered, finally turning. He was immaculate. He always is. “A sensitive matter.”

John gave a little, polite snort. “Aren’t they all?”

Mycroft’s gaze drifted to John’s left hand, calloused from trigger and pen, then to the faint shadowing near his eyes—poor sleep. “This one requires particular discretion,” he said mildly. “The kind of discretion that becomes impossible to purchase when money is irrelevant and power is arterial.”

“Stop polishing the words,” I snapped. “What happened and to whom?”

He studied me for a heartbeat too long. Accusation disguised as brotherly patience. “A blackmailer,” he said. “Targeting high-profile couples. Politicians. CEOs. A judge. Private lives turned inside out with surgical precision. They are paying. For now.”

“Why us?” John asked. He moved around me to take the seat, deliberately not looking at Mycroft. As if not looking gave him control. It never does in this room.

Mycroft steepled his fingers. “Because the commonality is elusive. There is no shared social circle, no mutual friend, no financial tether that binds all of them. Their public lives are meticulously separate.” He let that sit, then dropped it. “Except for one thing.”

John’s knee bounced once, contained agitation. “And that is?”

“Couples therapy,” Mycroft said. “A particular practice in Marylebone. Discreet. Renowned. Appointments are obtained through referrals only. Dr. Aris Thorne.”

I felt my mouth move before I wanted it to. “Aris Thorne,” I repeated. I didn’t hide my derision. “The one with the monographs on attachment theory in high-stress professional pairings. Lapdog of the peer-reviewed set.”

“Brilliant, though,” Mycroft said, almost indulgent. “And as a result, exposed. His sessions—if compromised—would be a vein of ore for anyone with the equipment and patience to mine it.”

John leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “You think the therapist is leaking?”

“I think someone is leaking,” Mycroft said. “Whether it’s Thorne, a staff member, or an external breach. What we know is that each couple, within weeks of seeing Dr. Thorne, received a message. Not clumsy. Not lurid. Compellingly curated selections of their private disclosures. Nothing that would destroy them at once—no. Just enough to frighten them, and to prove the depth of access.”

“Incremental escalation,” I murmured. “Ensures compliance while testing limits. Who’s the latest?”

Mycroft’s eyes slid to a folder on his desk. He didn’t push it forward yet. “An MP with a leadership bid. His wife is a barrister with her own public profile. They are very careful. They thought they were careful. They have a teenage son.”

John swore under his breath. “What’s being demanded?”

“At present? Regular payments into an account that dissolves and reforms every week. Small, by their standards. Palatable. But this is… prelude. Whoever is doing this is building toward either a catastrophic leak or a single, devastating ask. Either way, the damage will not be contained to marriages.”

I paced to the window, watched a bus crawl past a row of umbrellas. “You want us to go to therapy.”

“Not for your benefit,” Mycroft said.

“Obviously not,” I replied. The office offered my reflection back, a ghost in a coat. Mycroft’s eyebrows did their almost-smile. “You want us in the room.”

“In the rooms,” he corrected. “I want you inside the system in a plausible capacity that provides access without alarm. Anonymous infiltration of Thorne’s network is… ill-suited. He is attentive. He vets his clients with obsessive care. He will notice surveillance.”

John’s chair creaked. “Hold on. Are you saying—”

“Yes,” Mycroft said softly. “You will present as a couple. It will simplify approvals and justify the intensity of contact you will require.”

John’s laugh came out wrong. “No. Absolutely not. Find another route.”

“There isn’t one,” Mycroft said. “Not in the time we have.”

I turned. “You’ve already set the appointments.”

“A consultation, pending,” he allowed. “Thorne will see you if you meet his criteria. A credible history. Mutual residence. Intertwined schedules. He does not treat casual… intrigues.”

John stood abruptly. “This is ridiculous.”

“Is it?” Mycroft said, still calm. “You already live together. Your names are linked in a search engine more tightly than many spouses. The public reads you as a unit. They have for years.”

“We’re not—” John shut his mouth, jaw tight. He looked at me, something unnameable behind his irritation. “I’m not doing therapy theatre for your convenience.”

“It’s not for my convenience,” Mycroft said. “It’s to stop a contagion of coercion that will destabilize people with far-reaching influence. The leak must be identified without alerting the source. You are uniquely positioned to do this.”

I watched John’s breathing even out, the battle between refusal and responsibility playing across his face. He hates when duty is weaponised. He hates it and obeys it.

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

Mycroft slid the folder forward. I didn’t take it. John did, fingers tightening on the edge. Inside: anonymized case summaries, photographs of shredded cheque stubs, transcripts of messages. And a printout—Dr. Aris Thorne’s website. Clean lines. Warm light. Words like restorative and boundary and trust.

“Your first task is to be accepted as clients,” Mycroft said. “You will construct a plausible history that fits Thorne’s intake criteria. You will attend sessions. You will observe, you will test, and you will not break cover. If Thorne is innocent, he must not be alarmed. If he is complicit, he must believe you are vulnerable to the same leverage as the others.”

John was staring at a snapshot—a grainy image of a couple holding hands too tightly outside a courthouse. He didn’t look up. “What if he recognizes us?”

“He won’t, not consciously,” Mycroft said. “He deals in the private, not the public. And if he does—Sherlock can be persuasive.”

I smiled without warmth. “Understatement.”

Mycroft looked between us, that faint, tired affection he tries to hide loosening the line of his mouth. “I don’t ask this lightly.”

“You never ask lightly,” I said.

John shut the folder. “If we do this, we do it our way.”

“Within the boundaries of not blowing the operation,” Mycroft said. “Yes.”

There was a long minute where the city outside pressed its noise against the window, and inside, silence layered itself carefully over the decision already made. John slid the folder into his bag like it weighed something personal. He glanced at me. I tilted my head, already mapping the necessary lies to the truest facts we shared.

Mycroft stood, a signal that the audience was over. “Dr. Thorne’s assistant expects your call by the end of the day. Use the referral name inside. It will open the door.”

John didn’t thank him. I didn’t either. We don’t do that with each other. We move. We got as far as the hall before John exhaled, a sound almost like a laugh or a groan.

“This is insane,” he said to the carpet.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” I watched his shoulders square. The game had a shape now. The edges were unfamiliar. The puzzle was not.

We hit the street in a wash of cold air. John’s stride was sharp, clipped, the kind that chews pavement because it can’t chew the person responsible. I matched him and let him burn through the first minute.

“A couple,” he said finally, spitting it out like a shard. “He said we have to go in as a couple.”

“Yes.”

“No.” He stopped, turned on me. His eyes were clear and furious. “Absolutely not. He has crossed a line.”

“The line of efficacy?” I asked. It was reflex. He flinched like I’d slapped him.

“Don’t do that—don’t twist it into logic. This isn’t a lab. This is my—our—private lives repurposed for one of his tidy little operations. Therapy, Sherlock. Couples therapy. Do you hear yourself agreeing to that?”

I watched a bus shudder past, people stacked behind fogged windows. “I hear the problem. It’s elegant. It will work.”

“It’s invasive,” he snapped. “It’s humiliating. It presumes we are—” He shut his mouth and laughed, ugly. “Christ. Do you know what it takes to sit in a room and lay everything naked for a stranger? To make a job of it?”

“Yes,” I said, and he threw up his hands.

“No, you don’t. You think it’s all angles and tactics, performance. You’ll strut in there and try to charm him with deductions, and I’ll be the one sitting under a microscope while you play the world’s worst boyfriend.” The word hung, and we both pretended it didn’t.

“We need access,” I said. “Thorne’s selection process makes surveillance from the outside inefficient and conspicuous. The couples are targeted within weeks. If we wait to build a different route, we risk more exposure.”

He started walking again, jaw grinding. “So we sell ourselves. We say we’re together, that we’re… having problems. We talk about intimacy and boundaries and—God—sex, for the record, to lure a blackmailer. Do you have any idea how obscene that is?”

“Yes,” I said again, more quietly. “Obscene is allowing someone to string people along and slice them bit by bit. Obscene is letting fear metastasize because we’re squeamish about a role.”

He shot me a look, incredulous. “A role? You think I can just turn that on?” He slapped a hand over his chest. “I’m not you. I don’t disappear into a mask. I don’t—” His throat worked. “We live together. People already talk. I’ve had years of hearing it, of brushing it off. And now your brother wants me to walk into a room and say yes, that story you’ve all made up? It’s true. File me under a narrative that isn’t mine.”

The wind whipped his coat. I let him have the space to say it. He rarely said the part that cost.

“It’s not about labels,” I said. “It’s functional. On paper, we meet every one of Thorne’s filters. Shared address. Shared routine. Public presence that reads as bonded. We won’t have to fabricate much. That reduces the risk of detection.”

“That’s exactly what I hate,” he said. “We won’t have to pretend very hard. We’ll have to… take what we actually are and bend it into something else in front of someone whose job is to know the difference.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “It’s intimate. It’s not just answering questions. It’s being witnessed. And then recorded. God knows where that ends up if we misstep.”

“We’ll control it,” I said. “We’ll draw the parameters of what we share. We prepare. We decide what our invented problems are. We keep the case in view, not ourselves.”

He barked a laugh. “You can’t control a therapist. That’s the point. He’ll ask, and he’ll wait, and silence will make it worse until one of us fills it. And it’ll be me. You’ll watch. You’ll catalog. You’ll decide it’s all data. Meanwhile I’ll be… on display.”

We reached the corner. He stopped at the curb and looked at me, stripped of the sarcasm. “It is a personal invasion. I did therapy after Afghanistan, remember? Not couples. Actual therapy. It was work. It was… exposing. It took everything I had not to run. And now you want me to weaponize that. To make my face do that again, on cue, while the two of us pretend we—”

He broke off, swallowing, eyes on the traffic. His shoulder brushed mine, brief and bracing.

“It’s the most efficient path,” I said. “The risk is personal discomfort. The reward is stopping a predator.”

He stared at me. “Small price, is it? For you.”

“No,” I said, and surprised us both. “Not small. Not for me either.”

He blinked. “You don’t even—”

“I know what it costs to be observed,” I said. “I built a life around dictating the terms. This removes control. It forces… transparency.” I forced the word through my teeth. “I dislike it. Intensely. But efficacy remains.”

He exhaled, a sound like surrender’s first breath, but not enough. “And after? We walk back out and what? We un-say it? We pack everything up neat and pretend it didn’t… touch anything?”

“That’s later,” I said. “We handle now first. We handle the case.”

He looked past me, past the buildings, past the blurred mirror of the city. “You think you can win therapy. You think you can outsmart it. And maybe you can. But I’m the one who bleeds in those rooms.”

“I won’t let you bleed alone,” I said, and felt the truth of it settle between us, heavy and inconvenient.

He huffed, turning the corner toward Baker Street, anger exchanging places with something pained. “You’ll sit there and analyze me until you can name the color of my pulse,” he muttered. “You’ll reduce me to variables.”

“Only if you let me,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll be very respectful,” he shot back, but the heat was leaking out of it. He shook his head. “This is absurd. It’s absurd and it’s dangerous in a way I can’t shoot at or punch. It gets under the skin. Your brother knows that. That’s why he picked it.”

We walked. Rowan branches scraped brick. A siren braided itself into the sky and thinned. At last, he sighed, tired and angry. “I need to say this out loud: I hate this. I hate the entire premise. I don’t consent to being used like this by him.”

“You consent to the case,” I said. “Not to him. To stopping the person who thinks secrets are currency.”

He rubbed his mouth. “You’ll owe me.”

“I always do,” I said.

He looked at me sidelong, eyes fierce, the way he looks when he’s about to jump from a helicopter onto a roof because I said trust me. “If we do this—if—we set rules. We set the story together. And if I say we stop, we stop.”

“Yes,” I said, immediate.

“Good,” he said flatly. “Then we are not a couple. We are two idiots pretending to be one. We remember that.”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t want my answer. He pushed through the door to 221B like it had offended him. I followed, the echo of his objection still loud enough to fill the stairs.

He threw his coat onto the chair, missed, didn’t bother correcting it. The flat felt smaller with his anger pacing through it. He went to the kitchen like a man searching for something he could break that wouldn’t matter and found only mugs.

I stood in the doorway and watched him settle his hands on the counter, as if bracing for aftershocks. I could feel the old habit of dismissal, the one that lets me slide past human resistance because the puzzle is calling. I let it come. It was easier than standing in the heat of his refusal.

“The blackmailer is escalating,” I said. “Mycroft’s file gives us three couples—politician, tech investor, art philanthropists. Different circles, same timeline, same therapist. The leak begins within a fortnight of their first session. All three couples vetted the clinic. All three described Dr. Thorne as meticulous about confidentiality. That’s a constant. Either he’s compromised or he’s the bait. If we want a vector, we need access to his process, his paperwork, his patterns.”

John didn’t turn around. “We can get access through his receptionist, his billing office, his cleaning staff—”

“Already did,” I said. “In my head.” I walked in, took the mug from his hand before he could fill it, placed it back empty. “All routes are laborious, slow, and require bribing or charming three to five people, each a risk. Meanwhile, the blackmailer continues. The therapy route is singular. One point of entry, controlled conditions, direct observation. It’s mathematically superior.”

He faced me then, jaw hard. “Say it plain. You want to walk in and perform. You want to see if you can fool a therapist.”

“Yes,” I said. “Because fooling a perceptive professional requires a level of detail that will sharpen the case. It will force subtlety. It will keep me from being sloppy. It will keep us safe.”

“Safe,” he repeated, disbelieving. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Nothing about this is safe.”

“Safer than letting someone else sit in that chair and be carved up because I was squeamish about the method,” I said. “I am bored when the method is pedestrian. This is not. Thorne is reputed to be acute. He’s trained to notice microexpressions, incongruities. If I can pass, I will have a live read on what the blackmailer sees. If I can’t, he’ll refer us out or refuse us. Either way, we learn.”

He stared at me. He knows the signs when the gears catch. My voice goes clipped. My hands still. Time rearranges itself into a ladder I want to climb. He looked irritated that he recognized it, irritated that it steadied me.

“You’ll reduce us to a plan,” he said.

“I will reduce the situation to a plan,” I said. “We can write a narrative that borrows from our public record without touching anything you refuse. We decide on a history, on three core conflicts, on a pattern of habits that mimic what he expects. We tell a story of unmet need and miscommunication. We choose details that are true enough to be effortless and false enough to be safe. We rehearse. We align on cues. We decide who leads.”

“You,” he said, flat.

“No,” I said. “You. You’re the better liar when the lie is rooted in something you actually feel. You did it with Smith. You do it with patients when you say you’re fine to keep them calm. I will handle the scaffolding, you will handle the color. He will believe you more readily. He’ll watch me and think I’m performing. He’ll be right. The contrast will read as authentic.”

He laughed once, short and bitter. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Yes.” I moved past him, spread Mycroft’s file on the table, pushed aside the abandoned coat with a fingertip. “We outline now. We set rules. Rule one: you veto anything that feels like a line you won’t cross. Rule two: no mention of cases by name—everything euphemized. Rule three: if he asks about sex, we answer blandly. Functional, infrequent, sources of miscommunication. It’s the safest territory—boring is invisible.”

“God,” he said. “Listen to you.”

“Rule four: we decide a tell,” I continued, already writing on the back of an envelope. “If one of us feels overexposed, a verbal pivot. Something ordinary—tea, headache. I redirect. We do not bleed for his benefit. We control the hemorrhage.”

“You’re not selling this,” John said. “You’re bulldozing it.”

“I’m focusing,” I said. “Because the longer we linger in how it feels, the less likely you are to agree. And we need to agree. Not for Mycroft. For the next couple that gets stripped for parts on a phone.”

He swallowed. I watched the fight cycle through him, the part that hates being maneuvered and the part that hates watching bad things continue. They were both loud.

He came closer to the table, looked down at the notes I’d already begun. “Our story.”

“Yes,” I said. “Initial meeting—flatshare advert. Early compatibility—domestic convenience. Stressor—my work schedule, intrusive cases, erratic sleep. John registers unmet needs—attention, presence. I minimize. We argue. He moves out for a week—he doesn’t, but we say he did. He returns, we set boundaries—unenforced. Now we’re at therapy as a last attempt before… unspecified change.”

“You’re making me the reasonable one,” he said.

“You are the reasonable one,” I said. “It gives him an anchor point. He’ll trust you and challenge me. I can buy us time by indulging his curiosity. He will try to get us to name an origin wound. We don’t. We stay in surface conflicts. He will test by pushing for specifics. We have them ready.”

He put his hands on the back of a chair. “And when he asks why now?”

“Because you threatened to leave,” I said calmly. “Because you said you won’t watch me burn out. Because you love me and you don’t feel loved. The words will choke you, which will read as sincerity. He will look at me. I will give him nothing but a flicker. He will decide we’re a classic avoidant-anxious pairing. He will decide we’re his favorite kind of puzzle. He will invite us back.”

John’s eyes flicked up to mine, anger thinned by reluctant recognition. “You really can’t help yourself.”

“No,” I said. “And you can help me. That’s the point. This only works if we do it together.”

He exhaled and scrubbed at his hair, a sign of capitulation I never gloat over. “Fine. We try it your way. But we’re not going anywhere near the real… the real parts. We don’t touch them.”

“We won’t,” I said, and even if it wasn’t a promise I could guarantee, it was one I could intend. “We’ll keep it neat.”

He gave a sharp nod and dragged the chair out. “All right then. Write the lie. Make it easy to say.”

I handed him a pen. “We’ll make it true enough to be smooth and false enough to be safe.” He sat, and I began to map the edges of a deception that would pass as ordinary pain, the kind people pay to have witnessed while a stranger with kind eyes asks them to look closer.

We worked until the paper was crowded with bullet points: the date of our fictitious first kiss (never), the first night we supposedly slept in the same bed (after a nightmare—mine), a stilted timeline of arguments we could produce on demand. The floor between us might as well have been wired. Everything we did sent a small shock through the air.

John tapped the pen against the envelope. “We’re avoiding the point.”

“We are constructing a point,” I said. “Several. Clean, consistent, reproducible.”

He shook his head. “The emotional bit, Sherlock. We walk in there and he’s going to ask us how it feels to be in this relationship. And you’ll say something like ‘suboptimal’ and think you’ve answered.”

“Suboptimal would be specific,” I said. “I was planning on ‘strained.’”

He made a noise that was not a laugh. “Right. And you’ll sit with your hands just so and your face a blank sheet and he’ll practically salivate. You’re making bait out of yourself.”

“Bait is useful,” I said. “It attracts predators. We want the predator.”

He put down the pen and folded his arms. “Attracting him means exposing us. You’re writing these elegant little lies as if we won’t trip over the real things underneath when he prods. He will. It’s his job.”

“I have accounted for that,” I said. “If he asks about touch, we’ll say it’s inconsistent. If he asks how we fight, we’ll say quietly, with long silences. If he asks about jealousy, you say no and I say I don’t understand the utility of the concept. He’ll think I’m deflecting.”

“He’ll be right,” John said, too quick. He scrubbed his hands down his face. “Look—look at me. I’m not worried about whether we can remember a list. I’m worried about you sitting there and deciding the cleanest way around an honest question is to tell the truth by accident. You do that, you know. You drop it in the middle of a sentence like you forgot it mattered.”

I stilled. “Then we keep to parameters. You lead on subjects where my honesty would be… unstrategic. I’ll lead on chronology. You’ll lead on feeling.”

His mouth flattened. “And you’ll watch me while I talk about how hard it is to love you. Even if it’s a lie.”

“Yes.”

We looked at each other for a long time. The word love sat between us like something neither of us had any business touching.

He broke the stare first. “All right. Logistics,” he said, too brisk. “Are we living together? Obviously. Are we sleeping together?”

“Statistically, he’ll assume yes,” I said. “If we deny it outright, he’ll file us as avoidant-avoidant and try to force intimacy exercises. Unproductive. We say we are, but that it’s… infrequent.”

He flinched. “Can we not… can we not put verbs to it?”

“We have to,” I said. “Or he will. Better we choose language than have his imposed. We’ll call it ‘routine.’ We’ll say you initiate, I deflect. He’ll triangulate that into my control and your resentment.”

“Jesus,” John muttered, rubbing at his temple. “And do we have a history of cheating?”

“No,” I said, immediately. “It complicates without adding value. We need to be sympathetic to him, not salacious. Infidelity is noisy. We need quiet cracks he can pry at.”

“Fine.” He sat back, watching me. “Boundaries?”

“Shared bank account? No,” I said. “Too intimate, too entangling. Keys? Yes. Holidays? Rare. You want me to meet your sister, I am… busy. Friends? Lestrade knows, Mrs. Hudson suspects, Mycroft disapproves—accurate regardless.”

He huffed a breath. “And how do we… physically behave in the room?” He looked pained. “Do we hold hands? Do you want me to put a hand on your knee like those couples do on telly? Because I don’t—”

“No,” I said at once, sharper than I intended. “No performative touching. We underplay. He’ll be more alert to small gestures if the big ones are absent.”

“Small gestures like…?”

“Like you passing me a tissue without looking when I cough. Like me moving your tea closer with two fingers when he asks a hard question. Like you sitting a degree closer than comfort would dictate and me not moving away. He’ll see it. He’s trained to.”

John stared at my hand where it held the pen. “Right.” His voice was softer. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“Yes,” I said, and didn’t bother to hide it. “I’m good at thinking.”

“That’s exactly the trouble,” he said, sudden heat back in his voice. “You’re treating this like a chess problem. If I do X, he’ll do Y. Except it isn’t a game. It’s us. Me. And I am not interested in being one of your pieces.”

Something in me bristled. “You agreed to the plan.”

“I agreed to a plan,” he said. “I didn’t agree to you deciding when I will accidentally say something true. I’m telling you now: if it starts to feel like that—if I feel like you’re watching me for data instead of—” He stopped. “Instead of what I am—I walk.”

I sat with that. The instinct to argue was there, neat as a folded blade. I didn’t pick it up. “Then we add a rule,” I said. “Rule five: we do not analyze one another out loud after sessions. No postmortem. We do not score. We check for danger—did we reveal anything actionable?—and then we stop.”

His shoulders dropped a fraction. “And you’ll actually do that?”

“Yes.”

He nodded once, the motion grudging. “Fine. And we decide a fight we can pull out if he asks for a recent example.”

“I’ve already written one,” I said, sliding a page across. “The experiment with the adrenal extract in the kettle. You were furious. I was dismissive. You slept at a hotel. You didn’t, but you could have.”

“That’s too close,” he said quietly.

“Close reads as true,” I said, and gentled my tone when his eyes went flinty. “We won’t give details. We’ll give edges.”

He breathed out. “All right. Last thing.” He hesitated, then looked me straight on. “When he asks the inevitable—why we’re together at all—what do you say?”

I’d assumed the answer would be simple. Useful. Efficient. “Because we function,” I said. “Because we are… effective. Because life is less—” I caught myself. “Less empty.”

He went still, the way he does when a shot rings out too near. “That will do,” he said, after a second. “Say it exactly like that.”

I nodded and wrote it down as if it were just another line item. He watched my hand and not my face.

When the clock struck the hour, the room had cooled. We had a script. We had rules. We had a shared lie carefully calibrated not to cut. John stood, rubbed at the back of his neck and said, almost conversationally, “You do realize this all sounds like it might work.”

“It will,” I said.

He looked at me for a long beat, something unreadable passing through his eyes, then tipped his chin. “Right. Then we’ll rehearse tomorrow. For now, I need some air.”

He reached for his coat, missed again, and this time he corrected it before leaving it neatly on the chair, as if the small order might hold the larger chaos in place. He was halfway to the door when he paused without turning. “Don’t stay up all night building me into something you can manage,” he said, quiet but flat. “I’m not a case. I’m me.”

The door clicked. The room felt too full of everything we hadn’t said and the lines we’d drawn to keep from saying it. I capped the pen and wrote the last rule across the top of the page: Do not forget what is real. Then I underlined it, as if underlining could make it easy.

The door was barely closed before I uncapped the pen again. The list was orderly enough to be a map. I cleaned it, made it spare. I was still at it when I heard John’s steps on the stairs again, steadier, a little slower. He came back in without the coat, cheeks wind-pinked, eyes clearer.

“Tea?” he asked, already reaching for the kettle, catching himself, and then turning it on anyway with a rueful breath. “Right. No adrenal extract.”

“Noted,” I said. “We’re at the origin story.”

He took the chair again, sat forward, forearms braced on his knees. “Origin story as in the day in the lab, or the day Mrs. Hudson gave me the tour and you ran the deductions like a magic trick?”

“Both,” I said. “He’ll ask for the first moment that coded as attraction.” The word tasted like an unfamiliar spice. “We need something that won’t make you cringe.”

He squinted at me. “It’s going to make me cringe. You start.”

I scanned the bullet points and found the line that had been sitting under my tongue already. “The Pub,” I said. “After the first case. You were flushed with adrenaline. You smiled with your entire mouth, not just the corners. You kept glancing at my phone when it buzzed. There was a… vector.”

He rolled his eyes, but there was a faint upward pull at one corner. “A vector.”

“Angle and magnitude,” I said. “You were angled toward me and the magnitude of your attention was… not small.”

He rubbed his thumb over the edge of the paper. “Fine. So the first flicker is post-Study in Pink. And then… what? We pretend we kissed behind Angelo’s after the cabbie case?”

“No,” I said. “We say we didn’t, and that we didn’t because I said something cutting about sentiment and you pretended it didn’t land. We say we went home and sat too close on the sofa and didn’t talk about it.”

He swallowed. “Too accurate.”

“True enough to be smooth,” I said, and wrote it down. “What about the first time you slept in my bed? In the fiction.”

He stared at the rug. “Nightmares,” he said, after a moment. “Afghanistan ones, early days. You heard me. Knocked on my door anyway. Sat on the floor until I stopped shaking. Then you climbed onto the edge of the bed, shoes on, staring at the ceiling, talking about the chemical properties of fear until I laughed because it was absurd. And I fell asleep while you were doing it.”

I looked up. “That did happen.”

He nodded without looking at me. “Less like that. More like you stayed. You’re making this so he can ask if we’ve shared a bed. You want a tidy yes.”

“Yes,” I said. “And the first time we called it a… couple. The handover to doing it on purpose.”

He exhaled, long and thin. “After Baskerville,” he said. “After the hound. We were both wired and exhausted. You kept watching me to make sure I was breathing. You were… softer for a week. It would make sense. That’s when we might have said it. That it was a thing.”

I wrote Baskerville and circled it. “We’ll say we didn’t tell anyone. Secret by omission.”

He poured tea into two mugs, slid one toward me with two fingers without looking. I moved it closer to him. He huffed a small sound that wasn’t quite amusement.

“Arguments,” he said. “We need a few more to pull out of a hat.”

“Christmas,” I said. “Your anger when I humiliated Molly. Your disappointment. Your—” I stopped.

“My what?”

“Your face,” I said. “You looked at me like I’d ruined a thing you liked.”

He let out a slow breath. “We can use that. Not the Molly part. But the feeling. You pushing too hard publicly. Me shutting down. Silence on the walk home. No sex for… however long.”

“Infrequent,” I said. “Routine. Your initiation, my deflection.”

He grimaced. “You know he’s going to ask for positions.”

“He won’t,” I said. “Not explicitly. He’ll say ‘physical compatibility’ and wait. We’ll say we’re mismatched in timing, not in mechanics. He’ll make notes.”

“God.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine. Holidays?”

“Once to your sister’s, disaster,” I said. “Once to Dartmoor, fog, improved. One New Year’s in, just us and a bottle of terrible prosecco Mrs. Hudson swore was good. We fell asleep at ten. I woke at midnight and watched you breathe. It was—” I stopped. “Convincing.”

His mouth parted. He looked down quickly. “We’ll use that. First pet names?”

“No,” I said, flat.

He laughed, brief and grateful. “Thank God. Meeting friends?”

“Lestrade thinks we’re ridiculous, Anderson made a snide inference in the lab once, you threatened to break his nose with a micropipette. We left.”

“Accurate,” he murmured. “And… the moment we almost broke up.”

I considered. “Your therapist,” I said. “Before this, real therapist. You went. You told me afterwards that she suggested we were unhealthy. I called therapy performative pseudoscience and you said if I couldn’t respect the process, you couldn’t do this. We didn’t speak for forty hours.”

He squinted. “Forty?”

“Thirty-nine hours, twenty-six minutes.”

He stared. “We’ll round it.”

I wrote it. The paper was filling with our history concealed as invention. The room felt quiet in a different way, less defensive, more precise. Every time our memories drifted, we nudged them back into the borders of the lie.

“First public outing as a couple,” he said. “Dr. Thorne will ask if we show it.”

“Angelo’s,” I said. “He comped dessert and winked, we debated telling him and decided not to. He assumed anyway. He told us to sit at the back where it was quieter. You touched my wrist once to get my attention when the waiter came. I didn’t flinch.”

His eyes warmed, almost imperceptibly. “Good detail.”

I wrote it and underlined it. “Mycroft,” I said.

He groaned. “What do we say about your brother?”

“That he disapproves,” I said. “He thinks I’m distracted. You think he’s a tyrant. We are united in our annoyance.”

“We are,” he agreed, faint smile there and gone. “And Mrs. Hudson?”

“She’s pleased,” I said. “She makes far too many scones and leaves them where we will trip over them. She says we make the place feel settled.”

He sipped his tea, considering me over the rim. “Why does this feel like remembering and not making it up?”

“Because we’re not making it up,” I said. “We’re reorganizing. Editing.”

He looked at the mess of lines and circles and arrows between dates and cases. “All right. Final check.” He tapped the top rule with the pen. “We stick to these. We don’t go further in there than we’ve mapped here.”

“Yes,” I said.

He shifted his weight, knees knocking the table. “And outside of there?”

I held his gaze. “We don’t forget what is real.”

He looked at the rule as if it might bite. “Tea’s gone cold,” he said, and stood to make more, the simplest domestic motion, the safest one in the room. I watched the slope of his shoulder as he reached for the kettle, the way his fingers curled around the handle, and I realized the backstory we’d built had done what it needed to. It was plausible. It would hold. It had also lifted a corner of something neither of us had named and left it lying open between us, ordinary as paper.

“Tomorrow we rehearse,” he said without turning. “And then we go tell one of the best listeners in London a version of us that’s almost us.”

“Yes.” I capped the pen. “We’ll make it easy to say.”