Naomi considered this. "Are you?" The question sat on the table between them.
"No," Tav said.
"And you knew he wasn't, probably before he knew you knew, and you continued—" She made the same general gesture she'd been making lately to indicate the whole complicated situation.
"Anyway. And now you know officially, and you're." She tilted her head. "Not handling it perfectly."
"I'm handling it fine."
"You've been in this café for three hours and you've been staring at the same column since I arrived."
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Ablation.
SUBJECT VOSS ATTENDING FOUNDATION EVENT TONIGHT. MAINTAIN
VISUAL CONFIRMATION.
He deleted it.
Naomi watched his face with professional interest. "You do the scary phone thing. Both of you."
"What?"
"The way your expression goes when you look at your phone. Like you're deciding something important." "Alistair does it too. Same face. Different rings."
There was a commotion at the café entrance.
Tav looked up automatically.
Alistair stood near the front counter. He was talking to someone — tall, blond, the easy body language of two people who had found each other mutually interesting. He was doing the version of himself that he deployed for social settings: warm and attentive and calibrated to make the other person feel specifically noticed. The blond man laughed at something. Touched Alistair's arm.
Something happened in Tav's chest that was abrupt and ugly and entirely outside his control.
Heat, or its hostile relative.
Naomi watched him. Looked at his hands. Looked at the coffee lid he had applied sufficient force to crack neatly in half.
"Prescott," she said.
"It's structurally—"
"That was not a structural failure." She kept her voice carefully level. "He's looking at you."
Tav looked up.
Alistair was, in fact, looking at him from across the café. The conversation with the blond man continued but Alistair's attention was here, at this corner table, directed at Tav with the particular precision of a person who had been aware of Tav's presence from the moment he walked in and had been waiting for exactly this moment.
The warmth in his expression was directed at Tav.
The blond man didn't register it.
Tav stood.
Naomi said, very quietly: "Oh no."
He crossed the café.
