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“Yes.”
She grins. “Smart man.”
We eat.
The pancake is dense, smoky, and not entirely cooked in the center.
Anita watches me with predatory focus. “Well?”
“It has integrity.”
“That is not a flavor.”
“It is filling.”
“That is not praise.”
“It contains grain.”
She drops her forehead into one hand. “You are terrible at lying. How did you survive military intelligence briefings?”
“I was often not asked about pancakes.”
She laughs, then steals a bite from my plate and winces. “Okay, wow. That is extremely grain-forward.”
“Emotionally honest.”
“Do not weaponize my own nonsense against me.”
“I learned from the best.”
She narrows her eyes, but the smile remains.
The light falls across her face, catching the warm brown of her skin and the dark green of her eyes. Flour still marks her cheek. The stylus in her hair is starting to slip. She looks alive in a way that has so little to do with survival statistics. She looks like a woman standing in the ordinary world after discovering the extraordinary did not owe us mercy and choosing breakfast anyway.
My throat tightens.
She notices instantly. Her smile softens. “Where did you go?”
I look down at my tea. “To the edge of despair, briefly.”
Her expression shifts from teasing to attentive without becoming frightened. “Want company or distraction?”
The question itself is proof of how much she has changed. She does not rush to solve me. She asks how to sit beside the wound.
“Company,” I say.
She pushes her plate aside and reaches for my hand across the table. “Okay.”
I turn my hand beneath hers. Her fingers fit between my claws with practiced ease now. “I came close to letting shattered faith destroy me.”
“I know.”
“I do not mean sorrow. I mean something worse. In the archive, I thought if the foundation was false, then the life built on it was false. I thought every honorable action became performance, every comfort became deception, every dead soldier I had ever reassured became witness against me.”
Her thumb strokes across my knuckle. “That sounds like hell.”
“It was.”
