She glances at me, surprised. “You want the honest answer?”
“I rarely ask for anything else.”
She smiles faintly at that, but her eyes drift back to the water. “Small,” she says at last. “Smaller than you can probably imagine. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew your business before you did. If you wanted to leave town, people talked about it like you were announcing a terminal illness.”
I say nothing.
She’s easier with silence than most people. She fills it when she’s ready, not when she’s pressured. “We weren’t dirt poor,” she continues, “but close enough that money was always the thirdperson in the room. Every bill mattered. Every mistake cost too much. My dad…” She pauses, jaw tightening. “He had a temper. My mom had a way of making that feel normal.”
The words are plain. That makes them worse.
I look at her profile, the line of her face turned toward the sea, and keep my own voice level. “He hurt you.”
She lets out a breath that might be a laugh if there were any humor in it. “Not all the time.”
I go very still.
She notices. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“That thing with your face. Like you’re deciding which bones to break first.”
I hold her gaze for a second. “Maybe I am.”
That gets a real smile out of her, small and tired. “See? That’s not comforting in a normal-person way.”
“I was not raised for normal-person comfort.”
“No,” she says dryly. “That much is clear.”
The smile fades quickly.
“It was hard to leave,” she says. “Not because I didn’t want to. I wanted to for years. But leaving means admitting you might fail somewhere bigger, and if you fail at home at least everybody already expects it.”
I don’t like the calm way she says that either. “So, you left anyway.”
She nods. “With one suitcase and fifty-eight dollars and a bus ticket that felt way too expensive.” Her mouth curves. “Very glamorous.”
I picture her smaller, younger, getting on that bus alone, and something ugly moves in my chest.
“I worked awful jobs,” she says. “Diner shifts. Reception. Data entry. I thought if I kept my head down long enough, the city would eventually start making sense.”
“And did it?”
She snorts softly. “No. It just got more expensive.”
I laugh. “That sounds accurate.”
She leans her head back against the chair and finally drinks. “But I stayed. Which still feels miraculous some days.”
The late light turns her skin gold. There’s salt drying on her shoulders. Her hair is still damp from the sea, curling at the ends. She looks softer here, with the city stripped off both of us.
“You did more than stay,” I say. Her eyes cut to me. “You built something,” I continue. “Not what you planned, maybe. But yours.”
For a second she just looks at me. And because this is Zatanna, because she cannot let sincerity exist for too long without nudging it somewhere dangerous, she says, “Wow. That was almost encouraging.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
