“Always.”
She presses her palm flat against my chest, over the place where she always puts it, and looks up at me.
“Tell me,” she says.
But first, I want this. Just a minute more of this.
She seems to understand that, which is one of the things about her I could not have anticipated from a photograph ina white room—the way she reads silence correctly. She doesn’t push. She lies against me and waits, warm and patient, while I find the words to say.
When I find them, I say them plainly, because plainness is the only honest register I have, and she deserves honesty above everything else.
“I want all of it,” I say. “Not just this year. Not as Prey. All of it. I want you somewhere that is ours. I want the future that we build. I want it to be permanent in every way I can make it permanent.”
She goes very still.
“I know what I’m asking. I’m not asking you to decide today. I’m asking you to know that it is what I want so that when you are ready, the question is already answered.”
She looks at me for a long time.
“I trust you, Saint. I want that too.”
She says it the way she says the most important things, quietly, without drama, with the weight of something she has thought about carefully and is now done thinking about.
She holds my gaze without flinching. “I was just waiting for you to ask.”
Amy
We talk for a long time that morning.
He tells me about Unit 9. Not the operational version I already know from Azriel’s account but the full version. What years in four white walls do to a mind that was built for space. The way the fluorescents became his own sky. The way he built me from fragments in the dark, my photograph, Azriel’s stories, the outline of a person assembled from absence, and what it felt like when the fragments became real.
I listen the way I have learned to listen to him, completely, without flinching, without the performed empathy that sometimes passes for listening when, really, it is waiting for your turn to speak.
The things he says have edges, and the honest ones cut a little on the way through, and I let them, because that is what it means to be in the same room with the real thing.
I tell him about my mother. Not my father and not Roman.
My mother, who I have almost never talked about to anyone, because talking about her requires the courage of revisiting something good before it was gone, which is a different kind of grief than the ones I know how to carry.
I tell him she was funny. That she sang in the kitchen, and her singing was always slightly off-pitch, and she did not care at all. That she called me her best thing, and I was old enough whenshe died to understand what a gift it was to be someone’s best thing before you knew enough to earn it. That after she died, the house went quiet in a way that houses should not, and the quiet was what my father filled with his hands. The abuse. All of it.
Saint listens. He doesn’t say I’m sorry or that must have been so hard or any of the things people say because language has slots for grief, and we fill them automatically. He just listens. When I’m done, he is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “She would have seen you correctly.”
I look at him.
“Your mother,” he says. “She would have loved to see how beautiful you are.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
Then I put my face against his chest and let him hold it for me for a while, because I have been holding it alone for twelve years, and it is very heavy, and he is very steady, and I’m done proving to myself that I can carry things alone.
After a while, he says into my hair, “I want you to have what she had. The singing in the kitchen. The thing that makes a house into a home.”
I tip my head back and look at him.
He looks back steadily.
“Are you saying you’ll sing in the kitchen?” I tease with a smile.
