CHAPTER TEN
The rain started without warning. One moment the air was cold and dry and smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves. The next it was coming down in the steady way that meant it had settled in for the evening and had no plans to leave.
Freddie opened his umbrella and held it out to cover the top of her head. Which was easy as he had at least a foot on her. She took his offering as her due, stepping under it with the unstudied ease of someone accustomed to things being provided. They fell into step together on the wet cobblestones before either of them had technically agreed to walk in the same direction.
They walked. They passed the bar that was lit and low-voiced. Somewhere nearby, a door opened and closed and released a brief burst of warmth and the smell of roasting garlic.
"Thank you for the umbrella."
"You'd have got wet."
"I would have been fine."
"You would have been wet."
She made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite an argument. They walked another half block in silence that was, Freddie registered with some surprise, notuncomfortable. He was comfortable with silence. He had built his life around comfortable silences. What was unusual was that the silence felt shared rather than parallel. It was the difference between two people not talking and two people not needing to.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
He nodded.
She looked up at him again, and this time she seemed to have made a decision. "Why Valor? Of all the places."
"The Purple Heart Ranch," he said. "I went through the program. Last year."
Her steps slowed slightly. Not stopping — just a fractional adjustment, the way people moved when they were listening more carefully. She was quiet again. The rain came down around them. The umbrella held it off, and the cobblestones shone under the street lamps, slick and amber-dark.
"And after the program, you just stayed."
"I liked it here." Which was true. It was not entirely the whole truth. But it was the true part he had words for.
Wren nodded, looking ahead. A few more steps. Then: "I'm here for something similar, I think. Not the same — I didn't serve, I haven't — " She stopped. Started again. "It felt like a war. What I came from. Which is a terrible thing to say and I'm not trying to equate my — my ruined social life, my — " She winced. "I'm sorry. That's a stupid thing to say to someone who actually —"
"It's not stupid. Pain isn't a competition. Yours doesn't need to qualify against anyone else's."
"Right," she said quietly. And then, after a moment: "Thank you."
Freddie didn't bother withyou're welcome. It wasn't that kind of thing. She seemed to understand that because she didn't wait for it.
Just like it always took her a second to thank someone for doing the natural thing, the decent thing. The thing that was expected.
He could feel her wanting to keep talking and not knowing if she should. It was the restraint of someone who had learned, somewhere along the way, to measure how much of themselves to offer and to whom. He knew it because he lived there. He was surprised to find it in her, who seemed from a distance to move through the world with the expectation that the road would bend to meet her.
Freddie took a breath, and then he bent towards her. "I was overseas, on my second tour. There was a situation. A colleague. I made a call." He kept his voice even, level, without drama. "It left me with a hip injury. The limp's permanent." He paused. "I'd do it again. Without the limp, I'd have kept moving at the same pace. Probably would have left Valor within six months. Found somewhere else, something else. The limp slows me down. So I see things I'd have walked past. Notice things." A beat. "Smell the roses, apparently."
He hadn't meant to say that last part. It had arrived without his permission, which was happening more than he'd like lately.
Wren stopped walking.
Freddie stopped too.
She was looking up at him in the lamplight with an expression he hadn't seen on her before. Just looking at him. Directly, the way she looked at a book she'd decided was going to be important.
"That's beautiful," she said.
The rain came down around them, held off by the umbrella. The lamplight caught the bridge of her nose and the line of her jaw, and the particular way her mouth was slightly parted. Freddie was standing very close to her on a wet cobblestoned street in the dark and he was — acutely, entirely, with thephysical specificity of a man who had been managing this feeling from twelve feet away and had now run out of distance — aware of her.
The shape of her face in the amber light. The darkness of her lashes. The way her lower lip was full and soft, and she'd been biting it ten minutes ago, and he was not going to think about that, and was, in fact, thinking about nothing else.
