“Gets surprised when the pot doesn’t work.” He set down the instrument and glanced at Pip, who had righted herself and was now regarding the pot with narrowed eyes, clearly planning a second attempt. “She has done this dozens of times. Never once has she fit.”
“Hope springs eternal,” I said.
Outside, the rain drummed against the high windows, and the lanterns threw their amber light across the stone walls. Pip made her second attempt at the pot. I watched her, but my mind returned to a question I’d mulled over for days.
“Can I ask you something?”
He didn't look up from the cloth. “You’ve asked me many things.”
“Something personal.”
That made him pause, a half-second stillness in his hands before he resumed his work. “You may ask.”
I sat down on the low bench by the window, tucking one leg beneath me. Pip had wedged herself into the pot up to her shoulders and gone still, apparently deciding that if she didn’t move, physics wouldn’t notice her. I kept my eyes on her.
“What was it like where she came from? You never told me.”
“Yxia,” he said.
“You were part of the recovery team, right?”
“Yes.” His voice stayed level, but his eyes took on a faraway glaze. “We were there to assess what remained and document the carnage. Recover technology that we could salvage.”
“What was it like?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what it was like before I arrived. I know only what I saw.”
Pip had given up on the pot and extracted herself, shaking out her fur with great dignity before toddling toward my side of the room. I let her climb up onto the bench beside me, andshe pressed her warm, solid weight against my leg and began chewing on the end of my sleeve.
“And you found her,” I said.
“In the rubble of what had been a nesting complex.” He looked up. “She was covered in dust. I thought she was a piece of debris at first. Then she blinked.”
I said nothing. Pip tugged at my sleeve.
“There are regulations,” he continued. “I filed every report I was required to file,” he said. “And then I took her. This planet did not suffer destruction, so I judged it a better place to raise a child.
“She’s lucky,” I said. “That it was you who found her.”
He didn’t answer. He looked at Pip, who had abandoned my sleeve in favor of attempting to eat a button, and his expression went somewhere private and unguarded for just a moment before he pulled it back.
I should have left it there. I knew I should have left it there.
“And there’s no one else?” I asked. “No partner, or…” I stopped, but he understood what I meant.
His expression shut down. Not in anger, but in resignation. “No,” he said. He picked up the small instrument again and turned back to his work.
I pulled Pip into my lap and let her wrestle with my fingers, and I watched the rain trail down the dark windows, and I thought about proximity.Maybe that’s all my feelings were from. We’re sharing a space and routine and the most adorable baby in the galaxy. She decided she belonged to both of us, and we were her family.
I should probably stop watching him so closely.
Pip sneezed, spraying my wrist, and looked pleased with herself.
“Bless you,” Andrek said, without looking up, and the warmth in his voice when he said it, with an unguarded tenderness hereserved for her, settled into my sternum like something that intended to stay.
Proximity. I told myself again.
Outside, the rain kept falling. The lanterns kept burning.
