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He stands at the window, turned away, until I start composing an apology.

“I had a unit,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Eleven of us. Kalei doesn't have an army, it has tribes that lend each other people, and mine lent me at nineteen.” He says it evenly, like a report. “We signed a contract on Vesh Anaar in my fourth year. Escort. It was described as a low-risk transit corridor by a man who knew it wasn't.”

“How many came back?”

“Three.”

The rain fills in a while.

“I went home,” he says. “My tribe held a rite for the eight. It runs four days. On the third you sit with the families and you tell them what you saw, and you don't stop until they say stop.” He turns around. “I sat with eight families. And on the fourth day the elders offered me a place, a house, a wife eventually, all of it, because that's what you owe someone who has come back from a thing like that. You put them somewhere warm.”

“You didn't take it.”

“I took a contract on Halvic Station and haven't been home in fourteen years.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn't sit in a warm house on the strength of eight men who couldn't.”

I don't say anything. I've learned that much from him, at least.

“It was a mistake,” he says, after a while, and it comes out slower than the rest. “I understood that around year six. By then the shape of it was set. You take the work that ends, you leave before anything begins, and after enough years you stop being a man who is choosing that. You're only a man who behaves that way.”

“Draeven.”

“It's not a complaint. It's an accurate description.”

“It's the saddest thing I've ever heard and you delivered it like a weather report.”

“I'm told that's a failing.”

“It's not a failing.” I get off the table. “It's a habit, and habits are the only thing I'm professionally qualified to fix.”

He almost smiles. I'm getting better at spotting it. It happens in the eyes and nowhere else.

“Your turn,” he says.

So I tell him. About my mother, and the eighteen months of it, and being twenty-four and the one who handled the paperwork because I was the one who could. About Ben, who was patient and decent and left after four years because, and I'm quoting, being with you is like being cared for by an institution. About how right he was, and about the life I've built being the reliable one for thirty new children every year who leave in June and never write.

“I'm very good at it,” I say. “I'm the best teacher in that building and I'd fight anyone who says otherwise. But I have a flat with nothing in it, and a return ticket, and when I try to picture September I get the smell of floor polish and a class list.”

“And here?”

“Here I nearly died under a temple and I have never once been bored.”

The lamp does the thing lamps do. The rain keeps going. We're standing about a meter apart, which is closer than we were, and I don't remember either of us covering the distance.

“You've got a return ticket,” he says.

“I do.”

“When.”

“Twenty-two days.”