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“What you see is none of your business.”

“Probably not.” Olivia picked up her spoon again, took another bite, and chewed. Swallowed. “I looked the same way for about three months after Viktor, and I moved into shared quarters. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop being aware of him through the wall. Couldn’t figure out whether the exhaustion or the awareness was worse.”

Sloane’s fingers tightened around her fork. “I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Are we doing this? Are you going to sit here and tell me stories about your marriage, and I’m supposed to feel better because you went through it too?”

“I’m just talking about my own experience and enjoying Elena’s porridge.” Olivia gestured at her bowl. “You’re the one assigning motives.”

Sloane exhaled through her nose. She set the fork down. Pushed the plate an inch forward. The dining hall moved around them, bodies and voices and the smell of coffee and bread, and nobody was paying attention to two women at a back table.

“He didn’t come after me,” she said. The words left her mouth before she’d approved them. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, hard, wishing she could pull them back.

Olivia waited.

“Last night. He didn’t follow. He didn’t knock, didn’t push, didn’t stand outside my door like he has before.” Sloane stared at the table. A scratch in the wood ran from one edge to the other, thin as a hair. “He just stayed on his side.”

“And that bothers you.”

“No.”

“It sounds like it bothers you.”

“It doesn’t bother me. It confuses me.” The word cost her more than it should have. She felt it leave, felt the space it left behind, hollow. “I don’t know what to do with someone who doesn’t push.”

“Because you know what to do when they push.”

Sloane looked at her. Olivia’s face held nothing that resembled pity. Her eyes were dark, steady, the same focused quality she brought to briefings when she was cutting through noise to find what mattered.

“I’ve had people push my whole life,” Sloane said. “I’ve had people force things open, pry until they got what they wanted, and then leave when they found out it wasn’t worth the effort. I’ve had people leave before the prying. I know the script for both.” She ran her thumbnail along the scratch in the table. “I don’t know the script for a man who stays three steps away and doesn’t move.”

“It’s called space.”

“I know what it’s called.”

“Do you? Because I spent eight years confusing it with indifference.” Olivia leaned back in her chair. “Viktor gave me space for the better part of a decade. I told myself it meant he didn’t care. Turned out he was standing on the other side of every door I closed, just far enough back that I couldn’t accuse him of crowding me.” She paused. “The space wasn’t absence. The space was him choosing to be close without taking anything from me. I didn’t understand the difference until I stopped being afraid of it.”

Sloane’s throat constricted. She swallowed against it.

“I’m not afraid of Chris.”

“I didn’t say you were afraid of Chris.”

The dining hall noise swelled for a moment as a group left. Chairs scraping, voices rising, then settling. Sloane counted four breaths before she spoke again.

“When I was a kid, my father used to stand in the doorway of my room at night.” Her voice was low. Flat. The tone she used for tactical briefings, for facts that could be arranged into rows. “He didn’t always come in. He just stood there, and I’d lie still, and I’d wait to find out which version of the night it was going to be.”

Olivia didn’t move.

“After he was banished, I lived with my aunt. Iris. She was decent. She fed me, kept me clothed, kept the roof on. But she looked at me like she was waiting for me to turn into him. Like it was in me, and she was just watching for the first sign.” Sloane pressed her thumb into the table hard enough to whiten the nail. “Nobody taught me how to be near someone without bracing. I learned how to fight. I learned how to take a hit, how to read a room, how to make myself useful enough that people kept me around. I never learned how to stand still with someone and not be counting exits.”

“And Chris stands still.”

“Chris stands still. He sharpens knives at midnight and makes bad coffee and doesn’t ask me to explain myself. And I keep waiting for the condition. For the thing he wants in return.” Her voice scraped. “Because everyone wants something. Everyone has always wanted something.”

Olivia was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Sloane’s pulse had climbed and settled before she spoke.