"You moved my things."
She was at the desk, reviewing data on her pad, and she didn't look up. "I organized them."
"Without asking."
"The system was inefficient."
"It was my system."
Now she looked up. Her expression was calm, composed, the face of a woman who genuinely could not understand why anyone would object to improved organizational methodology. "Your system involved dropping items in the first available space. That's not a system. That's entropy."
"It's my entropy."
"We share this space."
"Which is exactly why you should have asked before rearranging half of it."
She stood. Slowly. The way she moved when she was processing something, recalculating, adjusting her read on asituation that had deviated from her expectations. "You're angry."
"I'm annoyed."
"Your jaw is tight, your shoulders are raised, and your voice has dropped half a register. You're angry."
"Fine. I'm angry." The admission came out hotter than I intended, and the heat of it surprised me. Not because I didn't feel anger. I felt it plenty. But I expressed it strategically, deployed it for effect, performed it when the situation called for intimidation or emotional manipulation. This was different. This was the actual thing, uncalculated and messy, rising through my chest because the woman I'd married had touched my belongings without permission, and something about that violation of the small territory I'd carved out in our shared life made me feel more exposed than any intelligence briefing ever could.
"It's not about the socks," I said.
"I know it's not about the socks."
"Then what is it about?"
She took a step toward me. "You tell me. You're the one who's angry."
I tried to find the calculation. The angle. The optimal response that would defuse the situation and return us to our careful equilibrium. But there was nothing to find, because this wasn't an operation. This was a marriage, and I had no training for it, no protocols, no handbook of appropriate responses filed under "domestic disagreements, early stage."
"It's about control," I said, and the honesty of it scraped going out. "I don't have much of it right now. My cover is blown, my former employers want me dead, I'm dependent on the goodwill of people I spent years deceiving, and the only space in this entire station that's mine is this room. Half of this room. And you took that half and made it yours."
Her expression shifted. Something moving behind her eyes that wasn't quite softness but wasn't hard either. Recognition, maybe. One person seeing another.
"You're right," she said. "I should have asked."
"Thank you."
"But you also should have said something the first time I refolded your shirts instead of letting it build."
"I was being accommodating."
"You were avoiding conflict. There's a difference."
She was right about that too. I'd been managing her the way I managed everyone, with smooth accommodation and careful agreement, and she'd seen through it because she always saw through it. Her ability didn't let me hide, and my instinct to hide anyway had turned a small issue into something that felt much larger than misplaced socks.
"I don't know how to do this," I said. "Fight. Not strategically. Just fight."
"You seem to be managing."
"I'm making it up as I go."
"So am I." She was close now, close enough that I could smell the station soap on her skin and something underneath it that was just her, warm and clean and alive. "Is this how marriage works?"
