I say none of this.
“Carnival are like that,” I reply. “Takes it out of you even when you’re enjoying it.”
She glances at me. She knows what I’m doing. “Yeah.”
We reach the corner of Doris Harrow’s street and I slow, expecting to stop, but she keeps walking and I keep pace. We go past the turn off but I don’t comment on it.
She needs to keep moving. I know this about her. Stopping means stopping with whatever she’s carrying, and she’s not ready to stop yet. So we walk, and the town settles around us. The carnival music fades to a low din from the riverfront, and eventually the street runs out at the edge where the cobblestones give way to the river path. We stop at the white picket fence.
She breathes.
“Better?” I ask.
“Yes,” she replies, and means it.
We stand at the fence for a while and I don’t manufacture conversation. She’ll talk when she talks. That’s what she does. She doesn’t fill silence for social reasons, and I’ve always been comfortable in silence, so we exist in it together. The river runs beyond the fence like a ribbon.
“You don’t ask things,” she says eventually.
“I ask things.”
“Not the things other people ask.” She’s looking at the water. “Jack asks everything, immediately, without any apparent filter. Archer demands and then retreats. Ryan…” She stops, briefly. “Ryan waits. But I can feel him waiting, which is its own kind of asking.”
“And me?”
She’s quiet a moment. “You just make space. And then you’re in it. And somehow I’ve said things I didn’t plan to say.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“I’m still working that out.” The corner of her mouth teases upward. “It’s effective. Whatever it is.”
“It’s not a strategy,” I assure her.
“I know.” She says it with the certainty of someone who has checked. “That’s the part I'm at a loss for.”
I look at the river too.
“I’ll tell you something,” I begin, “and you don’t have to do anything with it.”
She looks at me.
“I had a person, once, who I couldn’t reach. Not because they didn’t want to be reached. They did, I think, but they’d been alone with something too long. Every time I got close they’d find a reason to make the distance.” I pause. “I spent a long time trying to figure out the right approach. The right words. The right moment. Eventually I stopped trying to reach. I just stayed close and let them choose the distance.”
“Did it work?” she asks.
“Took a year.” A pause. “But yes.”
She’s quiet for a few moments. “I’m not…” she starts.
“I know,” I say. “I’m not telling it about you. I’m just telling it.”
She glances at me for a moment, and what’s in her expression is the thing I’ve been watching move closer to the surface all week. It’s not trust yet, but the precursor to it. The look of someone who has located something they might be able to trust and hasn’t decided yet whether the risk is worth it.
I hold the look steadily.
She looks back at the river.
We walk back eventually, at a slower pace than we came, and I take her the long way without comment and she doesn’t object. The town is mostly quiet now, the carnival settled into its late-night skeleton crew, the pub still lit at the far end of Main Street.
