“And the control—” she said it carefully, not as an accusation— “the needing everything to be managed and ordered and contained. That’s where that comes from.”
I looked at her. She was not analyzing me with the detachment of someone conducting an assessment. She was looking at me with a kind of… care.
“Chaos was dangerous when I was young,” I said. “Unpredictability was the condition under which bad things happened. Control was the tool that prevented it. I was very good at the tool and so I used it for everything, and eventually it became—not a choice but a default.”
“And then I walked into a hallway,” she said.
Something moved in my chest. “And then you walked into a hallway.”
She turned and started walking again. I walked beside her.
We went quietly for a few minutes, the low rise ahead of us getting no closer. The sun was lower than it had been, the light shifting toward the particular gold of desert afternoon.
“My mother left when I was sixteen,” she said. “She didn’t leave badly. She told me she was leaving, she made sure I understood it wasn’t me, she came back twice to check, and then stopped because the coming back made the leaving harder for everyone.” A pause. “Foster care was—” she stopped. “It wasn’t the horror story version. It was more like it was nobody’s business, particularly, that I was a temporary presence in a series of spaces, and everyone was managing that fact, including me, and I got very good at being self-sufficient because self-sufficient was the version of me that caused the least friction.”
I listened.
I understood this with the understanding of a person who had built the same architecture from different materials. Portable. Self-sufficient. The life organized around its own continuability without requiring anything from the outside to hold its shape. I had called mine control. She had called hers independence. They were the same structure with different finishes.
“You don’t have to be self-sufficient anymore,” I said.
“No.” The word came out quietly. “I haven’t been for a while. I’m just now admitting it.”
*****
We went outside again after dinner.
The evening had brought the temperature down by thirty degrees, which was the desert’s particular version of contrast—days that burned and nights that remembered they were high altitude and adjusted accordingly. I had found a thicker jacket in the property’s storage and given it to her before she could say she didn’t need it, and she had put it on without argument.
She had not said she didn’t need it.
The stars in the desert were different from the stars as seen from Las Vegas, where they weren’t seen at all—the light pollution absorbing them, the city so certain of its own brightness that it had made the rest of the sky invisible. Out here, the stars were the primary feature of the available darkness, spread in the density that people who live in cities forget is possible, the Milky Way faint but present.
Sofia stood beside me and looked up.
She didn’t speak for a long time. I didn’t either. The wind had dropped, and the desert had gone still, and we stood in that stillness—two people with a complicated history and a ring between them and a war back in the lit city forty minutes away—and looked at something that had been there before all of it and would remain after.
“I’ll end it,” I said.
That was when she looked at me.
“The war. Cruz and the rival faction and whatever else has positioned itself against this family in the past month.” I said it plainly, probably because I had thought it plainly. “I will end it before it reaches us again. Whatever it requires. Whatever it costs.” I paused. “I will burn the Strip before I let them use you.”
She looked at me for a long moment. The starlight was not enough to read her face with precision—I got the outline of it, the shape, the angle of her looking.
“That’s quite disproportionate,” she said, blinking.
“That doesn’t matter. It’s the truth.”
“Viktor.”
“It’s what I’ll do.”
She turned back to the sky. I felt, rather than saw, the slight shift in her weight—the adjustment of a person settling into a decision about proximity. Then her shoulder was against my arm, and then her head was inclined slightly toward me, and I put my arm around her the way I had put my arm around her in the car, in the dark, with her face against my jacket.
She let out a breath.
I held her in the dark under the desert stars, and she let me, and the space between who we had been and who we were becoming was present in the gap between one breath and the next, unmapped and real and moving in the direction of something I did not have a finished name for.
