I was teasing, dangling a secret like a locket on a chain, and Violet could tell. She narrowed her eyes and leaned on sharp elbows. “Whose delicate skin?”
“Someone new.”
“I see.” Her face showed no reaction, but one finger tap, tap, tapped on the glass of the countertop. “Perhaps you could describe this object more specifically?” Said the sameway an interrogator might askAnd just where were you on the night of November the twenty-fourth?
“Well, that’s the difficulty. I’m not certain you carry this kind of pattern.” She was glowering at me now, certain I was up to something but not able to deduce what. I couldn’t help it: A grin broke out despite my best efforts to repress it. “It must be hundreds of years since anyone asked you for a baby blanket.”
“For a—” She gasped. “Are you telling me someone’s gone and made a baby?Here?”
“They absolutely have.”
And Violet St. Owen threw her head back and laughed in delight.
Oh, I shouldn’t have liked making her laugh so much. But I did—the pleasure of it spread warmth through my chest, sweet as honey and twice as clinging. I’d better be careful or I’d never get free.
Violet sighed in pleasure. “My dear detective, that’s the opposite of a murder! However did it happen?” she asked, when at last she got hold of herself.
I leaned on the counter, smirking. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I absolutely would,” she confirmed. “People are always asking.”
“People ask a yarn store proprietor about how to have babies?”
She lowered those knowing eyes beneath her lashes, looking demure and humble and a lot of other descriptors that weren’t true. “I hear things, is all. You know that’s one of the rules people are most excited to break, once we’re planetside?”
“It won’t be a rule then,” I objected.
“It will still feel like one. Like they’re doing something forbidden, except there won’t be consequences for them to worry about. The purest kind of thrill.” I could think of others, but I wasn’t about to say so. Violet went on, “I predict a veritable explosion of infants that first year just as soon as people can pop them out.”
“Wellthat’san image.”
She cocked a head at me. “You don’t want to be a parent?”
“Being an aunt suits me better,” I said. Then paused. Then gathered my courage. Then went on. “You?”
“Oh.” She laughed, with the kind of inward sting that one reserved for one’s worst decisions. “I’m long since done with all of that.”
I wasn’t going to ask for the story. Not now, not here. But my not-asking was extremely loud in the silence that followed.
Violet St. Owen sailed the conversation blithely past the gap. “Are you going to have to convene the Crime Committee, do you think?”
Now it was my turn to dread a question, it seemed. I shouldn’t tell her anything. “I’m not certain,” I confessed instead. “It doesn’t appear to have been done on purpose.”
“So not retromatted? Or cloned?” Her eyes widened. “You mean someone carried it for nine months? In space?” She paled, and her voice trembled. “Is she…?”
“She’s just gotten out of Medical,” I said. “Reembodied. Though the baby was born five months ago.”
She chewed her lip. “So it wasn’t the birth that did it?”
“She said she had some kind of stroke.”
“That happened to my sister, when she gave birth to my niece.” It was barely more than a whisper.
Her too-careful expression was like a knife to my heart; I had to blunt that edge. “Ruthie’s petitioning for custody,” I said.
I’d hoped to make her laugh again, but instead she simply relaxed, resting her forearms on the counter and slumping over them as if some thread running through her had been snipped free. “Glad to hear someone in all this is being sensible. Ruthie’s exactly who I’d want to have raising a child.”
“Really?” I asked. “My nephew? Tallish, brown hair, once forgot to eat or bathe for two days because he was excited about a script he’d written for the shipmind? That Ruthie?”
