Page 128 of The Dangerous Dance

"Yes," I say.

"I hate that you're right."

"I know."

He looks at me for a long time. Then: "Two weeks maximum. If you're not out in two weeks⁠—"

"I'll be out before two weeks."

"Two weeks. That's the line. After that I'm coming in regardless of what the intervals say."

"All right."

"And Nadia." He holds my gaze with the specific intensity of someone saying something they need to say exactly right. "You come back."

"I know."

"I need to hear you say it."

I hold his gaze. "I come back," I say.

He nods.

The fight happens at noon.

Not about the plan — we've arrived at the plan, the plan is settled. The fight happens because I'm packing the go-bag with the tracker and the burner and the specific items that constitute reactivating a cover I've been dormant from for two months, and he comes into the bedroom and watches me pack and the watching has a quality that builds until it becomes something else.

"You're already gone," he says.

I look up. "I'm packing."

"You're already in the operational mode. The one that's not here."

"That's how this works. You know how this works."

"I know how it works. I don't have to like watching it."

I set down the tracker. "What do you want me to say? That I won't go? I'm going. That I'm not scared? I am scared. That the risk calculation is⁠—"

"I don't want you to say anything about the risk calculation," he says. He crosses the room and he takes the tracker from where I set it and he looks at it and he sets it back down and he looks at me. "I want you to come back."

"I said I would."

"Say it again."

"Liam—"

"Say it again," he says, with the specific quiet of a man who is asking for the one thing he can ask for.

I look at him.

"I come back," I say. "I come back to you."

He looks at me for a moment.

And then the space closes and neither of us is packing anymore and the go-bag is on the bed and the tracker is on the dresser and what's happening is the specific thing that happens when two people are about to be separated by something dangerous and the body makes its argument more loudly than anything else currently in the room.

Afterward we are on the bed with the go-bag between us like a fact neither of us is looking at directly.