"I think so."
"Then she didn't just love you," he said. "She believed in you. Before you existed. That's —" He stopped again, and this time the stopping was not caution but something that had run out of words.
Coreni's throat was tight. She did not let it reach her face.
"I have to go," she said. "I have things I need to do and not much time to do them in. But Dad —"
"I know."
"Be careful. More careful than you have been. Don't go to the lab until I tell you it's safe. Don't contact me through any channel that can be traced."
He nodded. He was already thinking, she could see it — the same look he got when a research problem shifted into a new configuration and he was recalculating everything. Twenty-six years of quiet preparation, and now the thing he had been preparing for had arrived.
She stood. He stood with her.
He held her for a long moment at the door, and she let him, and said nothing, and tried to memorize the weight of it.
"She would have loved you," he said quietly, into her hair. "She did love you. Just — early. Before you were here to receive it."
Coreni pulled back before she lost the composure she was going to need for the rest of the night.
"I'll comm you when I can," she said.
"I'll be here."
She nodded and walked down the corridor and did not look back, because if she looked back she would stay, and she couldn't afford to stay.
Edi-Veen was waiting at the building entrance. He took one look at her face and said nothing, which was exactly right. He didn't ask if she was all right. He didn't move toward her or away from her. He simply held the door and fell into step beside her when she came through it, and his hand found the small of her back for just a moment as they stepped out onto the pavement — brief and certain, there and then gone, the gesture of someone making sure she was steady without making a thing of it.
She was grateful for it in a way she wasn't ready to examine.
They walked.
The twin suns were setting over the dock district, painting the water copper and gold, and Coreni walked through it and thought about a woman named Sevaaki who had loved a human man and known exactly what it would cost her and done it anyway.
She thought she was beginning to understand that kind of decision.
She wasn't sure yet whether that frightened her or not.
Chapter Twelve
Coreni
She didn't talk when they got back.
Edi-Veen didn't ask her to. He moved through the apartment with the quiet efficiency she had grown accustomed to — checking the rooms, resetting the locks, doing the things he did every night now with a routine that had assembled itself without either of them discussing it. She went to the window and stood there with her arms crossed and watched the dock district settle into its late-evening noise and let the silence be what it was.
After a while she heard him in the kitchen. The soft sounds of water and the particular clatter of her least cooperative cabinet door, the one that always needed a second try. She heard him figure it out on the first try and felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn't known was tight.
He appeared at her shoulder with a cup of caffe. Not speaking. Just present.
She took it.
"Thank you," she said.
"You have not eaten since this morning."
"I ate at my father's."
