The nights are ours. We crack the frame of the couch in the bonding room in the second week, and all he says is, “We broke it together,” which for him is a whole speech. I laugh until he finds a better use for my mouth. I learn the sounds he makes when he stops being careful.
Some nights, we just talk, me in full sentences, him four words at a time. He tells me about his uncle, one of the loudest males in Stormbreak, who fought nine years at Kel Doru and regaled the great hall every winter afterward with the telling of it. Valdrek followed him around for three winters as a boy and memorized every story word for word. Then his ears drop to half-mast and hold there, a position I don’t have a reading for yet, and he goes back to his soup. He doesn’t say anything else, and I don’t push.
My family calls on the second Friday. MOM AND EVERYBODY, the group call is labeled. I let it ring out. The voicemail is forty seconds of my sisters arguing about a casserole dish, and my name isn’t anywhere in it. Not one question about the daughter who’s fifty miles out at sea with aliens. That never used to bother me. It does now.
My wrist aches from the heaviest workload of my career, and he notices. There’s a nightly wrist massage, his thumb pressing into the sore spot until I moan.
One morning, the vent behind my chair in the hearing room is quiet, rerouted somewhere. The janitor says one of the candidates had a word with maintenance about it. Six words, apparently. People wrote them down. I never told one living soul I was cold.
Diane checks on me twice a week like I’m a science experiment. She says what I have is a loud version of the scent-match, and that they don’t fully understand why it hits some people more than others. That makes two of us.
Every day the transcript stack gets thicker, the Tuesday ferry appointment gets closer. Valdrek and I never say one word about it.
Which is how I end up here.
It’s three in the morning, and I’m certifying the last eleven hundred pages against the Monday deadline and a Tuesday ferry ride. My wrist is screaming and my eyes are gritty when the corridor starts to smell like juniper. That gives me about forty seconds before he knocks.
He fills the whole doorway, and he’s carrying a tray. Tea for both of us, a bowl of the delicious stew and thick bread. Tonight he’s included one of the cafeteria’s oversized cookies.
“It’s three in the morning,” I say. “How did you even know I was up?”
He sets the tray down. “I just did. You work when the building sleeps. Someone should feed the person who keeps the record.”
I look at the tray. The tea is exactly how I like it, and he knows how I butter my bread now.
“You have to stop doing this,” I murmur softly.
His ears drop half a degree. “Feeding you?”
“Making it impossible to leave.”
As soon as I say it, I realize I’ve been waiting for him to ask me to stay.
He goes very still and doesn’t argue. He pulls a second chair over to my desk and sits down. “Eat. Then talk to me.”
The stew reminds me of that first night all over again. The longer he waits for me to speak, the more I want to tell him everything. So I do.
I tell him about growing up the fourth of five Delgados, in a house where dinner was a competitive sport played at full volume, where my sisters could all talk over each other in stereo and my father held the floor, a one-man filibuster. If you paused to think before you spoke, the conversation continued on without you. That house is where I figured out by age nine that nobody was going to pass me the microphone, so I became the audience. Somewhere in there, I stopped asking for things, too. Asking cost more than it paid. I got so good at listening that the family started calling me the easy one. They just didn’t know everything I wasn’t saying.
“I found stenography in a community college brochure,” I say. “A job that was one hundred percent listening. It seemed perfect. I told my family I’d be keeping records that outlive everybody in the room, and my sister said, and she meant it kindly, well, thank God they have jobs for people like you.”
And for some reason, I tell him more.
“There was a guy,” I go on, because apparently three in the morning is the hour everything comes out. “I was with Daniel for four years. He was a talker because that’s all I knew. When he left, he said living with me is like living with a wall.”
The chair creaks as Valdrek shifts, and I lift my eyes, afraid of what I’ll see. I don’t want to be a wall for him.
His gaze burns into mine. “You are not a wall, Wren. A wall gives nothing back. You gave him four years of yourself, one word at a time. I have watched you give every speaker in that hearing room the same perfect attention.”
A happy buzz builds in my chest. He doesn’t think the same way as Daniel.
“We are the same,” he continues. “I have given people my attention my whole life, and I know what it takes out of you.” He pauses and takes a breath. “I know the cost.”
Okay, keep going,I think, but I don’t trust my voice to say it.
“You’re the island’s quiet one,” I say instead.
“Yes.” He holds my gaze. “You gave me your worst sentence. Now keep one of mine.”
