Page 35 of Ward

She picked her tablet back up, the morning resuming around her like weather around a mountain, and added, in exactly the voice she used for portions:

“Special today’s the red stew. My mother’s. It travels.” A beat, and her eyes came up once more, and there was something in them that had no name in any of his registers, warm and level and completely without mercy. “Three days is a lot of dinners, Eric.”

He did not sign it that night.

He sat with the pen for an hour, the instrument square before him, the plate square beside it, the card in the drawer where he had told himself one kept such things.

He could not stop thinking about her arsenal of plain sentences: you moved like a man who’s already lost somebody exactly once, and eat all of it, and okay, gently, like a door left on the latch in full view of the man swearing he’d never use it.

Two days, he told himself, and the number had stopped sounding like anything at all.

He cleaned a blade that did not need cleaning until the third bell, and it did not help, and he knew, cleaning it, that it had never once helped, and that she would have known that just by watching him hold it.

Chapter 12

Tisha

The kitchen after close was her favorite room in the galaxy, and she’d been in the galaxy’s rooms now, so it was a considered ranking.

Ninth bell gone. Service done, staff gone home, lights banked to the low amber she kept them at for cleanup because full light after a service felt like being interrogated.

The day’s work still hung in the air — smoke and bread and her mother’s red stew, sold out by the middle bell as it had been on four continents before this — and Tisha moved through the warm dim doing the last of it.

Counters.

Steel.

The pass, wiped down in long slow passes that were half work and half liturgy.

Day twenty-nine.

Tomorrow the window closed, and a careful man would sign his careful paper, and she’d said okay to it at the pass like her chest hadn’t been doing the screen-door-in-a-storm thing, because pressure was the one thing his walls were rated for and she’d promised herself never to be weather.

She had learned that drill before long division: orders were real; wanting was private.

You made the last night good, packed food for the road, and did not make the person leaving carry your wish to be chosen on top of everything already in the duffel.

Her family had loved one another through every departure that way. Somewhere along the way, Tisha had mistaken that kindness for the whole of love.

The strange part — the part she’d been turning over all evening like a stone in a pocket — was the posting.

Two days now, he’d stood her seventh bell.

In armor, on duty, at the wall by the service door: delegation security, doubled on the commons since Marsh, and the guard who was filing his rejection in — she checked the nothing on her wrist — thirty-some hours had assigned himself, personally, to the exact room he was allegedly leaving.

He stood through the service each night, running his sweeps and holding custody of her exits, then ate at the corner table with his helmet on the bench like a dinner guest.

If anybody could explain how I will be filing and I will personally hold the door of her hall lived in the same man, they were welcome to the last of the wine.

Not that the rest of the week had been quiet. Two Bridge vendors had pulled their standing orders the morning after the recut, polite and vague about it. Her father had called at an hour that meant he’d seen the feed, and asked only whether her door locked. She’d said yes. She’d moved the dry-goods drop to the service corridor without telling anyone why, and kept the stew on, and every night the hall had filled anyway.

She could explain it, actually. That was the trouble. Her father had explained it on a porch in Georgia when she was eleven: his body’s decided it’s the only thing keeping him alive.

The wall wasn’t between him and her anymore.

It stood between him and the version of himself that already knew, and a man like that didn’t need arguing with. He needed what the scout needed. Supper at the wire, and somebody patient enough to let the perimeter finish teaching itself.

She wrung the cloth. Started the pass again.