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“The stars are the same, but we name them differently,” he says. “My brother taught me both.”

“Your brother?” I ask.

“Night,” he says. “He rules there now. Has done since Hex stepped aside.” A pause, something almost wry creeping into it. “He would tell you the stars bow to him personally, given enough opportunity to talk about it.”

“I’d like to meet him someday,” I say. “If that’s ever something that happens.”

“I would like that,” he says.

We stay for a long time. Longer than we probably should, given I’ve got an early lecture. The cheese is long gone. The whole ridiculous, lopsided evening is settling into something I already know, even as it’s happening, I’m going to remember for years.

He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. He just stays there, nearly solid, close, entirely present. Somewhere between the stars coming out and the last of the cheese disappearing, I managed to stop thinking about prophecies, or Magdalene, or anything else waiting for us beyond this fence.

We don’t come back to it, not High Priestess Magdalene, not the goats, not the salt that very nearly flew across the coffee shop. We agreed at the start of this evening, and neither of us seems inclined to break the agreement early. There will be time for all of that. There will have to be. Just not tonight, not here, not with cheese still on my fingers and his shoulder solid and cool beneath my cheek.

Just this. Just him, learning happiness one disastrous picnic at a time, and me, watching him learn it, feeling something in my own chest shift to make room.

I think, quietly, that I could stay here a very long while.

Eventually the cold gets properly into my bones, and we pack the cheese wrapper and the untouched jam back into the picnic basket. Then he helps me back over the railing with the same solemn care he showed getting me in. And we walk home slowly, unhurried, in no rush at all to let the evening end.

“Same time next week,” I say, at my door, mostly joking.

“I will find somewhere unlocked,” he says, entirely serious.

I laugh the whole way up the stairs, still tasting cheap cheddar and something that felt, for a few hours, remarkably close to ordinary happiness.

Chapter 10

That’s a shame

The library is quiet tonight, properly quiet. The good kind. I’ve got a whole desk to myself, and a stack of contract notes I’m mostly ignoring, in favour of just sitting here, pen tapping against my textbook, thinking.

Things have gone surprisingly well, all things considered.

Felix knows. Adam knows. Dark knows and doesn’t seem to be at all alarmed, as the wonderful picnic confirms.

Felix only asked about the prophecy once during our last shift, in the same tone he’d ask about a delayed delivery. Adam’s stopped going pale every time Magdalene’s name comes up, which I count as genuine progress.

The whole business is out in the open now, no more hiding it behind careful jokes about goat yoga. And the world hasn’t ended.

I snort at my own joke, entirely alone at my desk, which is possibly a sign I’ve been revising too long.

Maybe the goats got it wrong. Maybe thirteen goats standing in a circle really was just goats being goats, a coincidence dressed up as cosmic significance by a woman who wanted, more than anything, for her strange, lonely faith to finally mean something.

Maybe everything’s actually going to be fine.

I have been telling myself this for a few days now, and it has started to feel almost true. The way anything does, if you repeat it to yourself often enough in a quiet enough room.

I underline a sentence I haven’t actually read and pretend, for a moment longer, that I genuinely believe that everything is fine.

Something cold slides down the back of my neck.

The shiver arrives like an old friend letting themselves in without knocking. I look up, already smiling, and find him standing beside my desk, close, solid, and entirely focused on something across the room that isn’t me.

I follow his gaze.

There’s a couple a few tables over, the only other people left in the library at this hour. They’ve abandoned any pretence of studying entirely. Instead, they are tangled together over a stack of forgotten textbooks, properly kissing. The kind of kissing that makes you feel faintly like you should look away, and also faintly like you can’t.