"I know," he says, very quietly. "I've known for a while."
I stare at him. "You—what?"
"I told you." The corner of his mouth moves. "It has always been easy."
I want to say something. Several somethings. Instead I lean forward and press my face into his shoulder and feel him wrap his arm around me, and I just—stay there. In the middle of a public park. Like a person who is in love and has decided, finally, to stop acting like that's a problem.
"You're still in trouble," I say into his jacket.
"I know," he says, and I can hear the smile in it.
"A heads-up next time."
"You have my word."
I tilt my face up to look at him. He's watching me with the kind of attention that used to make me want to argue with something just to redirect it, because I didn't know what to do when someone looked at me like I was a thing worth looking at.
I'm learning.
"So," I say. "A sabbatical."
"A sabbatical," he confirms.
"And Solvi."
"And Solvi."
"In your apartment."
"In my apartment, yes."
I consider that. The three of us, rattling around Mythara for a year. Solvi's drawings on the walls and Flicker shredding things she shouldn't and Kaelion making coffee in the morningand probably correcting my syntax even when I'm not writing anything.
It sounds, frankly, like the best possible problem to have.
The fountain keeps going. The moons are out early, faint and green-blue at the edge of the sky, and the village is doing its afternoon thing all around us—unhurried, unconcerned, entirely indifferent to the fact that something just shifted in me that I don't think is going to shift back.
That's fine.
I don't want it to.
EPILOGUE
KAELION
One year ago,I would have called this unprofessional.
Sitting in the third row of the University’s main symposium hall, in a seat I did not reserve through the faculty portal but rather through my twelve-year-old daughter, who got here forty minutes early and saved two spots with her jacket and her sketchbook and what I can only assume was a very effective glare at anyone who tried to sit down.
One year ago I would have said this was inappropriate. A conflict of interest. A situation requiring careful management and a great deal of documentation.
Now I'm just a man in the third row.
It's an improvement, honestly.
"She's going to be great," Solvi says, for the fourth time, without looking up from whatever she's drawing. Her tendrils are doing the thing they do when she's excited and trying not to show it—twitching in small, rapid increments, like they can't quite hold still.
"She's always great," I say.
