"Did it?"
"Partly." He met Alistair's eyes. "What about you?"
"Architecture," Alistair said. "How structures hold weight."
"You left that to come to Ablation."
"Yes."
"Do you regret it?"
Alistair was quiet. He studied the window, the evening city.
"I used to," he said. "I don't any more."
"Why not?"
He turned to Tav with the honest expression.
"Because the path that brought me here is the path that brought me to this kitchen," he said.
The wine. The lamb. The Tuesday evening.
"Yes," Tav said.
They finished dinner.
• • •
CHAPTER FIVE
Tav broke into Alistair's bedroom three days later.
"Broke into" was technically imprecise — the door was unlocked, as it always was during the morning when Alistair was out. No force was required, no mechanism circumvented. What was required was intention, and the willingness to cross a line he had been standing at the edge of for several days.
He crossed it.
He waited seven full minutes after the apartment door closed behind Alistair — long enough to account for a forgotten phone, a wallet left on the counter, the variety of small reasons that caused people to turn back. He counted them down in the kitchen with his coffee, doing nothing that would need to be explained if Alistair returned, and then he set the mug down and walked across the apartment.
The bedroom door opened silently under his hand.
Chaos.
That was his first impression, and he stood in the doorway simply processing it. Clothes draped over the desk chair. Books stacked in ways that suggested they'd been read and set down rather than shelved — some face-down, some bookmarked with receipts and scraps of paper. Half-used candles. A plant on the windowsill that was, against all probability, thriving. Sketches layered across the desk and the floor beside it, sheets of paper bearing images in confident charcoal strokes.
It was the room of someone living in it, rather than occupying it.
Tav stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
He looked more carefully.
The clutter was real — genuinely inhabited rather than staged — but it had a quality he'd been halfexpecting once he started looking for it. Nothing blocked the pathways through the room. The desk sat at an angle that provided clear sightlines to both the door and the window. The apparent disorganization resolved, on closer examination, into a kind of organized chaos: visual noise that concealed structure the way camouflage concealed shape.
Interesting.
He moved to the desk first. Top drawer: pens, receipts, loose batteries — the detritus of a genuinely lived life. Second drawer: notebooks, most of them the small field kind favored by people who moved around, filled with handwriting that was small and fast and somewhat illegible.
And, beneath the notebooks, a sketchbook.
