"I know I don't."
"I'm saying it so you know this isn't me waiting for the rest of the story."
"Then what are you waiting for?"
"Nothing. The storm to pass."
She put her feet on the floor. The stone was cold even with the stove going. "Stormcallers are rare," she said. "Not the good kind of rare. The kind where most of us don't make it past forty because the power eats us alive or we lose control and take people with us. My father was one of the last. I'm the only one I know of now."
He was quiet. Listening. Not arranging his face into something sympathetic, just listening and she couldn’t stop herself from filling the silence with things she would prefer not talking about.
"My emotions amplify weather. That's the simplest way to say it. Fear, anger, grief, anything strong enough to get past my hold, and the sky answers it whether I want it to or not." She glanced at the candle. "The night your ship came in, I woke up with something I couldn't put down. Old. Ancestral, maybe. And the storm built before I could get ahead of it."
"That's why you live out here."
"That's why I live out here. That's why I practice at Corin's. That's why I keep the buffer zone Twyla likes to mention." She pushed her wet hair behind her ear. "And that's why I am genuinely, truly sorry about your ship. I know I said it before and you had every right to not believe me, but I need you to hear it now. I'm sorry. I am working on this. Every single day."
"I believe you."
"You don't have to say that."
"I don't say things I don't mean. Ask anyone on my crew." He shifted against the counter. "You said a past catastrophe. The one in the note."
"Yes."
"And you said the real version is longer than what you told me."
"It is." She held his gaze.
"Alright."
"That's it? Alright?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Most people push."
"Most people haven't spent a decade learning when to let a line out and when to pull it in."
Her laugh came out as something closer to a breath, half-amused and half-raw, and it surprised her. She couldn't remember the last time someone had made her almost laugh while she was talking about the thing that had shaped her entire life.
He was still leaning against the counter. Still watching her. The candlelight played across the planes of his face and she tracked it without meaning to, the straight nose, the stubble along his jaw, the mouth that said very little and meant all of it. Storm-gray eyes that were not looking away from her.
The pull was back. Louder now. Not in her chest anymore but lower, warm and insistent, and she recognized it for what it was this time even if she didn't understand why it was this strong or this specific to him.
"Why are you like this?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"Calm. Since the inn, you've been calm. You were furious with me and then you just... stopped. You came to Corin's with a delivery. You fixed my shutter. You're sitting in my kitchen in a blackout letting me talk about my dead father and you haven't once tried to make it about you or your ship or what I owe you."
"You want me to be angry?"
"I want to understand why you're not."
He was quiet for a beat. The fire crackled in the stove and the rain moved on the windows and she watched something cross his face that he didn't let her read.
"Because angry doesn't help you," he said. "And you don't need another person making you feel like your existence is aproblem. That doesn’t help me with needing fair weather and it doesn’t help you at all.”
