"Recalibrate," Tav repeated.
"Run the operational assessment on what the feeling meant and conclude that it was a liability."
Tav found his face.
"It is a liability," he said.
"I know."
"Significantly."
"I know." Alistair held his gaze steadily. "I've known since week two. I made peace with it." Something warm moved in his expression — the honest kind. "I made peace with it because the alternative was spending the duration of this assignmentpretending not to feel a thing that I clearly felt, and I've spent a long time doing that and I am, apparently, done doing it."
The morning light was building outside the windows — the full color of a autumn day, the city below waking up to its ordinary business, entirely unaware of the recalibration occurring in apartment 15C.
"What happens now?" Alistair asked.
"Nothing operational has changed," Tav said.
"That wasn't what I asked." A pause.
"No," Tav agreed. "It wasn't."
He moved from the other side of the island to Alistair's side of it and stood close — not dramatically close, He studied Alistair sitting on the barstool at roughly eye level and registered his expression: steady, patient, not performing anything.
"Now," Tav said, "we continue to do what we've been doing. With the addition of this." He was quiet.
"Whatever this is."
Alistair's mouth curved.
"Whatever this is," he agreed. He reached out — a small gesture, deliberate and particular — and touched the inside of Tav's wrist with two fingers. The pulse point. The contact that had been building as a habit for two weeks. "I'm not afraid of what it is," he said quietly.
"I know," Tav said.
"Are you?"
Tav thought about this with the honesty it deserved. "Not of what it is," he said. "Of what losing it would cost."
Alistair absorbed this.
"Yes," he said. "I know that cost."
They were quiet — the morning and the coffee and the apartment that had become something different from what it was. Not worse. Something that required a different kind of attention.
"Ablation will notice," Tav said.
"Probably already has."
"The monitoring data—"
"Shows two people who've been at the edge of this for several weeks and have stopped pretending otherwise." He studied his coffee. "What they do with that information is the part we can't control."
He met Tav's eyes. "What we can control is whether we make decisions from fear of their monitoring or from what's actually true."
Tav studied him.
"What's actually true," he said slowly.
