Page 73 of Omega’s Fold

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long have you known you were going to have to sell?”

“Always.”

He shuts his eyes.

I stand there with the wall against my back and my hands in my jacket pockets and watch him.

“Let me come to the scan.”

“There’s no room in my truck,” I say stupidly because it’s the only thing I think of first. “Three of us up front is tight. Four is not happening.”

We stand in the alley. The wind has picked up. There is a candy wrapper blowing along the gutter at the end of the alley, end over end, slow in the cold. I watch it go.

“We can go in my car.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a four-door. There’s room.”

“I said all right.”

He almost laughs. It does not come all the way out, but I see it try. His face does not quite know what to do with itself.

We walk back round to the front of the diner. Through the window I can see Caleb watching us come, not looking like he is watching us, and Matthew with his face an inch from the glass and his breath fogging it.

Julian opens the door. The bell rings.

Mr. Follett looks up from the till. He has put two pancakes and a side of bacon down in front of Matthew and a coffee in front of Caleb.

“Sit, hon,” he says to Julian. “Coffee’s at the counter when you want it.”

“Thank you, but I’ll join here.”

He slides into the booth on Caleb’s side and takes the seat opposite mine, next to Matthew.

Matthew puts a forkful in his mouth and chews it slowly while looking at Julian. Julian looks at the table. The tips of his ears have gone red.

The drive to Eastfield is an hour and ten minutes on the back highway. Julian’s car smells of new plastic and rental-lot cleaner and underneath both of those, faint, of him. He drives. I sit in the passenger seat. The boys are in the back. Caleb has his hood back up. I watch him in the side mirror once and then I leave him alone.

Julian breathes in through his nose, slow. He is doing it on purpose. I can see the rise of his chest. He is breathing me, the way I am breathing him, and neither of us is saying so, and the cab of the car is small enough that the air has nowhere else to be.

Biscuit is in the footwell behind Caleb’s seat with her chin on his boot. We’d dropped her at Donna’s on the way through last week, when the heat came on, and Matthew had made me promise twice she could come home with us after. She had. She wasn’t leaving Matthew’s side again if she could help it. We drop the boys in the parking lot of the strip mall on the east side of Eastfield. It is the kind of mall a city alpha would not call a mall. There is a discount shoe store and a pet supply place and a multiplex that shows three movies. Caleb takes cash. He counts it in his pocket without looking. He says, “Two hours.”

“Two and a bit. I’ll send you a message when we leave the clinic.”

Caleb turns. He puts a hand on Matthew’s shoulder. Matthew waves at us with his small free hand and lets Caleb walk him toward the multiplex doors. The automatic doors open and they go in, then they are gone.

Julian breathes out.

The clinic is a low building set back from the road behind a parking lot with two trees in it. There is a sign in the window that says family planning, prenatal, women’s health, men’s health, walk-ins welcome. The receptionist takes my name and my date of birth and the booking reference from the appointment letter. She looks at Julian.

“Is this the partner?”

I say nothing for a half-second. Julian says, smooth as the day I met him, “Yes.”