Page 20 of Fated, Allegedly

"Good," Nash says, and I hear real relief in it. "Rude I can answer."

"Does it go both ways? Am I supposed to be feeling something?"

"Sometimes it's mutual and immediate. More often the human half feels a pull they can't explain and it takes months, or years, or never." He turns to face me finally. "Never is allowed. It isn't a contract. It's not binding on you. It happened to me, not to us."

"But it's binding on you."

"Completely."

"So there's no version where you meet someone else in five years and build a nice life."

"No."

I stop pacing. "Nash, that's awful."

He laughs, startled and rough. "It's not, generally. Ask my mother. But I take your point."

Here's what I do, because I am who I am: I go and get my notebook.

He watches me come back down the dock with it and doesn't say a word about the timing.

"I need to work through this in writing or I'll do it badly in my head," I tell him. "Interrupt if I'm wrong."

"Go."

"Problem one. I don't have a control." I flip to a clean page. "I met you at the pinnacle of the worst professional year of my life, isolated in a strange county, while somebody was breaking into my cabin. I've been under continuous threat since day dot, and you've been the person removing the threat every single time. That's not romance, that's conditioning. There's years of literature on misattribution of arousal, and I've been marinating in the exact conditions that produce it."

"That's fair."

"Problem two is worse, and it's yours." I look up. "You've known from day one. Every kindness you've shown me has been performed by someone with an interest. How am I supposed to weigh the jar of arnica or six loaner cameras when the person handing them over was hardwired to hand them over?"

Nash takes that one on the chin. He thinks before he answers, which I've come to expect and still find remarkable.

"You can't," he says. "Not from those. So weigh the ones with a cost." He counts on his fingers, unhurried. "The bond told me to keep you. I gave you the road out and the keys. It said to hold on to what I know. I gave you sixty-one names and my father's cheek swab." His mouth twists. "I'm telling you, tonight, before you've had a chance to want me on your own, because you deserve the information more than I deserve the odds."

I write nothing at all in the notebook.

I sit down next to him with my legs hanging over the water. Our shoulders are touching again.

"I won't tell you what I feel tonight," I say. "That's not cruelty. It's that I've made two large decisions recently and I'd like to make the third one slowly, with all the facts, the same as anything else worth getting right."

"That's exactly what I want."

"Don't be too gracious about it, I'm rattled." I bump his shoulder with mine. "But for the record, Hanson, the pull's there. I noticed it days before you told me it had a name. I filed it under 'inconvenient' and kept ignoring it."

He is still beside me. Then he laughs, low and disbelieving, and drops his head.

"Days."

The elders come at nine at Nash's house and we lay the papers out on the long table, and the mood goes underwater fast.

Hazel goes silent over the polygon map. Owen reads the roster twice. Grace stands behind me with a palm on the rear of my chair and says nothing, which from her is a scream.

I take the shipping paperwork, because that's the pile nobody else wants and it's where the truth always is. Procurement records are boring on purpose. They're also the only documents in any organization that can't lie, because somebody has to actually receive the thing. It takes me two hours and a pot of tea to find it.

"Nash. Get me the disappearance map."

He brings it. I put the two side by side and start marking with a red pencil, and my heart's racing, and I have to stop twice to be sure I'm not seeing a pattern just because I want one.