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“It does.”

“I know. I’m not going to promise you I’ve changed. I don’t know yet if I can. But I know what it said to you, and I know I said it in front of her. I wasn’t trying to take anything off you, and it never once crossed my mind that I was. It does now.”

Then Astrid turns her head and looks at me.

Not past me. At me, from eight inches, long enough that I know she’s making herself do it and isn’t going to stop. She has the whole file on the man she married now and she hasn’t put it down and she hasn’t moved off my shoulder.

Nobody has ever done that.

The back of my neck goes hot. I let her look.

“Say the rest,” she says.

So I say the rest, and the rest is the one nobody can do anything with.

“In April somebody’s going to sit me down and tell me whether I get to keep the only family I’ve ever had. It isn’t going to be about whether I want it. I can’t work any harder. I did every rep that woman ever wrote down for me, complained the whole way through and did all of them anyway, and what it bought me was months.” I reach up behind my head and take hold of the edge of the bench. “Maren can’t save it. Silas can’t. You can’t, and you’re the best there is at it, and I’m not asking you to. I can’t. There’s nothing to fix and nobody to call and it’s going anyway.”

My throat closes on the way in and I go through it at normal volume, because if I whisper it I will have to say it twice.

“I’m scared.”

Beside me she moves.

“Don’t.”

She stops.

“I don’t need advice.”

“All right.”

I hold the edge of that bench until my fingers hurt and then I let go, and the two of us sit there, and my breathing comes back down without any help from anybody.

“You asked me to sit here while you do this,” she says. “I am sitting.”

Something in my chest gives way. Not all of it. Enough.

I put my forearms on my knees, and she doesn’t touch me until I turn one hand over between us.

Then she puts hers in it.

Her hand isn’t steady. Not shaking. Not steady, the way a hand is when its owner hasn’t decided anything about it, and I hold onto it and don’t say one word about that either.

After a while I can lift my head.

“That kid has never asked me for one thing.”

Astrid doesn’t move.

“Three months. Not a ride, not a dollar, not a glass of water. She waits until it’s offered and then she takes it like she could go either way about it, and she’s twelve years old, and she didn’t learn that off the TV.

“She learned it off the strongest person she’s ever met. She’s going to be formidable and I’d like to be in the building for it.” I turn my hand so hers sits better in it. “I’d just like her to know she can ask. Not me. Anybody.”

Nothing in her face changes.

The tears just come.

Both sides at once, straight down, and she doesn’t put a hand up to them and she doesn’t turn away and she doesn’t make one sound. Her mouth stays closed and her eyes stay open and stay on mine.