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“She stole my bread.”
“Boldly,” he agreed, which was its own kind of worse. Rowan ate her sourdough. The candles burned low, the storm went quiet, and a man who had walked eight blocks in the rain to check a ward line sat at her kitchen table.
This. This was the thing she had thought was over.
Tor stayed until the last candle burned down to its final quarter and the storm moved off. Mirelle walked him to the door. He stopped in the doorway, his jacket back on. Her eyes moved over him, wet hair mostly dried, his stillness, all of it, and she put her palm flat on his chest the way she kept doing, the casual way that had stopped being calculated somewhere around the second time. He leaned down and kissed her there, with the rain-smell drifting in and the ward line quiet underfoot. It was not brief, and it was not urgent. He’d walked eight blocks, and he wasn’t in a hurry now. He held her with both hands, one at her cheek, one in her hair, her hands catching his jacket and holding on, the night air around them, the candles still burning in the kitchen behind her, and none of it mattered except this.
When they stopped, she had both fists in his jacket lapels and her forehead against his chest. “Thursday.” Against her hair. “The rigging,” she agreed, without moving. “And the arm.”
“I was going to check it anyway. You know I was going to check it.”
“I know.”
“I have a system.”
“You do.” She could hear the corner of his mouth in his voice. “It’s logical.” She laughed against his shoulder, and the warmth coming off him was its own kind of answer.
Mirelle let go of his jacket. He stepped back, and she stayed in the doorway as he went down the front steps into the quiet post-storm street. He glanced back once — once — and she scooped her wine glass off the table by the door and raised it at him. He shook his head and kept walking.
Good, that’s what she was going for.
She closed the door.
The hallway was warm and candlelit, and the Lantern drifted in from the kitchen, settling on her left. The creatures on the windowsill had dimmed to a low amber glow. Rowan, sourdough finished, now conducted a quality review of the refrigerator’s exterior surface. The loneliness was still there. It would always be there, in some form: the house large, the children gone, the last years of the marriage what they were. But it was hers now. The right size. Not amplified, not weaponized, not someone else’s instrument. Hers. To do with as she chose.
She went to the kitchen to see if any sourdough was left.
There was not.
SIXTEEN
TOR
The rigging lesson lasted two hours, which was longer than he’d planned. The rigging itself wasn’t complicated: Tor had done this long enough that the mechanics were second nature. Her questions took the time. Not the polite-interest kind. The kind that meant she’d thought it through, found the spot where it stopped making sense, and wanted it fixed. “That still doesn’t explain how the hull keeps its shape when the rigging is pulled.” To her, this was critical.
“Both sides pull evenly as the mast rises.”
“That should collapse it sideways.”
“The hull isn’t rigid at that stage. It’s —”
“Show me.”
He showed her. She took it in with the focused stillness she always had — eyes on his hands, then on the bottle, then on his hands again. When the mast rose and locked into position, she let out a satisfied sound, and he noted it with more attention than the mechanism warranted.
They moved on to the current build, further along than he’d led her to believe because he’d worked on it in the mornings before the day’s complications set in. She spotted it immediately. She missed nothing. “You’ve been working on this. This isn’t where it was last time.”
“I had some free mornings.”
“Before or after the patrol with the five modified creatures?”
“Before.”
“Before or after the two-hour debrief with the Elder Council?”
He considered lying about the order of operations. “After.”
Her eyes met his. She’d developed a whole face for this. “You’ve been working on the ships instead of sleeping. This is very Tor.”
