That’s the first thing I see when I open the door, an enormous scarred miner filling my doorway with a canvas duffel in one hand, still wet from the rain, looking exactly as he looked an hour ago except now he has luggage.
“What are you doing?”
He steps past me into the apartment, sets the bag down beside my couch, and turns around.
“I’m sleeping here.”
“What?”
“On the couch. Until this is finished.”
“But…”
“Your brother is not accounted for,” he rasps. “He knows this building and has a Minecorp key that has not been revoked yet because revoking it tells his employers what we know. He left this colony in a hurry with beings behind him who kill witnesses.” He says it like he’s reading a manifest. “You are alone on this floor. So I’m sleeping here.”
“You can’t just…”
“I’m not asking you.” Absolutely flat. “You can be angry with me. You can not speak to me. You can tell me to sit in the corridor and I’ll sit in the corridor. But I’m not leaving this floor at night, and the alcove is cold and I’d rather be inside the door than outside it.”
And I stand there in my own doorway with my mouth open and about nine different things to say, and then I decide that I want him.
“That couch is going to be too small for you.”
“Yes.”
“Like, comically too small.”
He takes his boots off and puts them by the door, which for some reason nearly sets me off again.
I get him a blanket. It comes up to about the middle of his chest and both of his feet hang off the end of the couch by a full arm’s length, and he arranges himself on it anyway without one word of complaint, sitting up with his back against the arm and his face toward the door.
I stand in the bedroom doorway for a second, looking at him.
“Are you going to sleep at all?”
“Some.”
I should say something. There’s an enormous amount to say, I’m still furious with him, I think, somewhere under the exhaustion. I’m going to be furious with him again tomorrow, for not immediately telling me about Andrew. And but he alsoheld my hair back on a bathroom floor tonight and knew about my baby for weeks and never made me say a word.
Both things are true and I don’t have anywhere to put either of them.
“Cayzor.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t leave,” I say.
The dark is quiet for a moment.
“I won’t Mara…I won’t.”
Chapter Seventeen
Scar
Iwake before the suns, the way I always do, and for a moment I don’t move.
She’s asleep beside me. On her left side, because that’s the only side she can manage now, with the good pillow wedged under her belly and the bad pillow between her knees and a third one she stole from me some weeks ago and has never given back. Her hair’s across her face. One gloved hand is curled up near her mouth.
