"Hi," Alistair said.
"Hi," Tav said. Neither of them said anything else.
Alistair crossed to the kitchen island. He sat on the same stool he always sat on. He watched Tav make the coffee with the attention he brought to things he was trying to understand, and Tav made the coffee with the same deliberate method he always used, and both of them were behaving exactly as they always behaved in the morning.
Except that they weren't.
"You're quiet," Alistair said.
"I'm usually quiet."
"This is a different kind of quiet." He rested his elbows on the island. "It's the kind you make when you're thinking about something you haven't decided how to say yet."
Tav set the cups down.
"I'm not—" He stopped.
"You are," Alistair said. Not unkindly. Just accurately.
Tav watched him.
This was the problem, or the form the problem had taken this morning: Alistair Keaton in the daylight, in ordinary clothes, making himself comfortable on a barstool in the kitchen, was more disarming than Alistair Keaton in any other configuration. The management was lower in the morning. The performance was lighter. He occupied the kitchen with the naturalness of someone who had been doing it for years rather than weeks, and he watched Tav with warm amber eyes he had decided, somewhere between midnight and now, to stop performing the distance.
"You're assessing," Alistair said.
"I'm making coffee."
"You're making coffee and assessing what last night means in the context of the current operational situation."
Tav looked at him.
"No," he said.
Alistair tilted his head. "No?"
"I know what it means operationally," Tav said. "Last night doesn't change the operational situation.
The Protocol is in motion regardless. Ablation's monitoring continues regardless." "What last night changes is everything that isn't operational."
A pause.
"And what is that?" Alistair asked.
It was a question that deserved a precise answer, and Tav was a precise person, so he thought about it carefully before speaking.
"It means," he said, "that there's a person in this apartment whose continued presence is now something I actively prefer rather than merely accept." He looked at the coffee. "And that I would experience the absence of that presence as a loss rather than a return to baseline."
A silence spread in the kitchen — not uncomfortable, the silence that arrived when something had been said plainly and its weight was being absorbed.
"That's very—" Alistair started.
"I know," Tav said.
"Specifically worded."
"That's how I say things."
"Yes." Something cracked in Alistair's expression. "It's one of the things." He reached forward and picked up his coffee with both hands and held it in the deliberate way he always held things he was choosing to be present with. "I prefer your presence too," he said. "I have since week two. I just didn't want to say it in a way that would make you." "Recalibrate."
