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He’s been here almost thirty years, and he’s still doing the whole calculation the same way he did it the first time.

“What do you do,” she said, “when it gets to be too much?”

He glanced at her. Not the assessment look. A different one. Deciding whether the question was the real one or merely an opener to it.

He looked at the water. “Radios.”

“Radios.”

“Old ones. Mid-century, mostly. Old ones with tubes and dials that people threw out when transistors came along.” He looked straight ahead. “You take them apart, find what’s broken, and fix it. It works or it doesn’t.”

“And when it does work.”

“Then it works.”

She pictured a man who had been alpha of this territory for thirty years — managing a ward system that degraded if you blinked, running a council with competing agendas, and holding the line against an unresolved threat — going home to sit at a long table with components in orderly rows, fixing things with clear answers. It was either broken or not. It either worked or not. No ambiguity. No Rift. No politics.

She understood this so thoroughly that it knocked against a rib.

Stop. Don’t read into it. He fixes radios. Lots of people have hobbies.

She looked at the railing they passed and didn't look at him.

She waited for more. There wasn’t any more. He’d given her the complete version, and it was seven sentences.

“That’s an interesting coping mechanism.” The real thought wasn’t shareable, so she went with that.

“It works.” A dry shrug, economical as everything else about him. “What do you do?”

She opened her mouth to say she went for walks or organized things, or any of the other acceptable answers she gave when people asked.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. “I bake.”

He looked at her.

“Badly,” she added. “Consistently, reliably bad. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years, and I haven’t improved in any measurable way. The output is almost always inedible.”

“Why do you do it?”

“The point is the process.” She looked at the water. “Not the output.”

He was quiet beside her for a beat. Two. Then: “Same.”

One word. He meant the radios. She knew he meant the radios. The parallel landed anyway, and she did not know what to do with the fact that Drayce Waryn fixed vintage electronics for the same reason she made inedible scones. Because the process had an answer, and the answer was always the same, and sometimes that was the whole point.

She kept her eyes on the boards under her feet, then on the lamppost they were passing, not on him.

She would need to have a serious conversation with herself about this later. She would be stern. She would lay out, point by point, why none of this was useful. She had reasons. They were good ones. She would write them down and review them.

She was going to write that list as soon as she got home.

She was absolutely going to write that list. Probably. Once she stopped thinking about the word same and how a single syllable had no business affecting a person.

“Don’t tell anyone about the baking,” she said, because standing there, processing the word same, was getting genuinely inconvenient.

“Wasn’t planning to.”

This was extremely unhelpful of him.