Page 130 of The Dangerous Dance

She nods. She picks up her tea and she drinks it and she sets it down and she looks at me with the expression she has when she's decided what to say and is deciding whether the deciding was right.

"I've known a lot of people who have gone into situations like this," she says. "In this life. Men, mostly, because it's mostly men in this life." She pauses. "Some of them come back different. Some of them don't come back." She holds my gaze. "You're going to come back the same."

"How do you know."

"Because you know what you're going back for. People who know what they're going back for come back." She pauses. "People who are running away from something or toward something they don't understand — those are the ones who get lost."

I look at her.

"You're brave," she says. Simply. Without the performance of warmth or the diplomatic softening of something difficult. "I want you to know I think that. Not because it's useful to say. Because it's true and you should know it's true before you go."

I stand in the sitting room of the house in Carroll Gardens with my go-bag and the afternoon light and Ailish's specific directness and I think about what it means to have been seen by someone who doesn't give the seeing away casually.

"Thank you," I say.

She nods.

She picks up her coat from the chair. "The car's outside. I'll take you to wherever you need to start from."

"You don't have to⁠—"

"I know I don't have to," she says, with the tone of someone who has never done anything because they had to and doesn't intend to start. "I'm choosing to."

I pick up the go-bag.

At the door I stop.

"Ailish," I say.

She looks at me.

"Tell him—" I start.

"He knows," she says.

I look at her.

She looks back with the expression of a woman who has been watching two people arrive at each other for two months and has run out of patience for indirect communication on the subject.

"He knows. But when you get back, tell him yourself."

I nod.

We go.

The car is outside. The city is doing its city thing, indifferent and continuous. Ailish drives and I sit in the passenger seat with the go-bag on my lap and the tracker in my pocket and the burner in the interior zip of the bag and I think about Viktor's coffee shop and the specific quality of his patience and how long it's going to hold when I walk back in from the direction he wasn't expecting.

I think about my father.

I think about the line.

I think about what he chose at the end and what it cost him and what I'm choosing now and what I'm choosing it for, and the difference between those two things is the distance between a man who had nowhere else to be and a woman who does.

I have somewhere else to be.

Two weeks.

I close my eyes for a moment.