“It’s a guest bed,” I say. “People do that here.”
“People.” Brock, from the window, and I’d forgotten he was standing there, which tells me exactly how far gone I am. “Do they?”
He doesn’t push it. He doesn’t have to. Brock’s been reading this room since he walked into it, and there’s plenty to read tonight between the strange bedding, the woman he’s already gone for, and Gunnar, refusing to admit he’s comfortable.
I give him nothing.
Giving Brock nothing is its own tell, and we both know it.
There’s no way I win this, so I’m going to ignore it and enjoy my blanket fort.
“Leif?” I say, to get him off me.
“Not coming up.” Brock finally leaves the window, pulls the chair out, and doesn’t quite sit. “He’s down there walking the same line he’s been walking for an hour.”
“The perimeter’s fine.”
“I know.” I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “He knows it too.”
So. Leif is downstairs inventing reasons not to be in a room. I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen him do that, and not one of them ended anywhere good.
“Wonderful,” Gunnar says. “He’s pacing the lawn, she’s in there texting, and nobody’s told me why the three of you crossed a realm and lost your ever loving minds the moment you saw her. And that houseplant… It’s not normal.” He glares at Gerald.
He says all of it from inside her blanket fort.
“Somebody brief me. Quietly,” he adds, and before anyone can tell him why that’s a horrible idea, “I can be quiet.”
He cannot be quiet. But the question’s fair, and it’s mine, because I’m the one who’s been here.
So I tell them.
“Three years ago, the Vestry came to me.” I give it a second, because I know they’re not going to like this. “Not the unit. Me, specifically. Down a channel that isn’t supposed to exist. Around Leif. Around all of you.”
Gunnar sits up in the blankets. “They went around Leif?”
“They’d felt a disturbance on this side. Something they couldn’t figure out, and they wanted eyes on it. Quietly.” I can still hear the way they said quietly. “So I crossed.”
“And?”
“I found her.”
Nobody moves.
“I knew what she was the moment I saw her.” I don’t say the word. Nobody asks me to. “And more than that. I knew what she was to me.”
I look at them, one at a time, because they’ve earned the whole thing.
“I was done for. You’ve had one night of it. I’ve had three years.”
Nobody laughs. Nobody argues either.
“I stayed. I told myself it was for a little while — just until I figured out how to make sure it ended well. I never figured it out. The report was supposed to say what the disturbance is. I knew what it was by the end of the first day, and I could not work out how to hand it to them, because I don’t know what the Vestry does with something that isn’t supposed to exist.”
The radiator ticks. Down the hall, her mattress shifts.
“She’s not supposed to exist. But she does.”
“You let us bury you,” Brock says. There’s no accusation in it, which is worse.
