Page 68 of Pocket Wife

“Your father. Jessa. Celia. Nara. Torren, though he called it something considerably less polite.”

“That sounds like many people offering advice they have no intention of following themselves.”

“Accurate.”

She makes a tired sound that almost becomes a laugh. I close the door behind me. The corridor outside still buzzes with movement—witnesses rehearsing statements, Jessa routing files, Torren arguing over drone blind spots. No one in Solaris Valley has slept.

Here, for once in hours, the noise feels distant.

Lucy keeps her gaze fixed on the wall. “How many do we need?”

“To win?”

“To make it impossible for them to erase us.”

I move to stand beside her. “More than they can discredit before sunrise.”

“That is not a number.”

“No.”

She finally looks at me. The sight hits harder than any legal threat. Bruises still shadow her skin from the crash. Flour clings near the line of her jaw from helping in the kitchens earlier. Her eyes are reddened from smoke, fatigue, and the weight of holding everyone else together.

“I am so tired,” she says quietly.

The words are small. Honest. Not weak.

I want to offer strategy, structure, solutions. Instead, I pick up the abandoned tea, warm it between my palms, and hand it to her. She drinks a little. I count it as victory.

For several long moments we stand together before the wall of names. Children’s drawings line the lower boards beneath the testimony lists: twin suns over fields, a crooked crawler, a blue stick figure with triangular shoulders that is unmistakably meant to be me standing beside a brown figure with wild curls.

Lucy notices my gaze. “The children added you.”

“I appear to have geometrically improbable shoulders.”

“You do.” A real smile touches her mouth, then slips away. “If we lose tomorrow, those children will remember this as the week the adults promised protection and failed.”

“If we lose, they will also remember that the valley stood on record.”

“That does not save their homes.”

“No,” I say. “But it saves the truth of what was taken. And I no longer want only to preserve truth after it is lost.”

Lucy sets the cup down. “That is the part that scares me about you. You know how to survive loss by keeping perfect records. I know why—your people, your world. But I don’t want a beautiful record of Solaris Valley. I want the valley itself.”

“So do I.”

The answer comes without hesitation. Lucy turns fully toward me.

I let the truth stand bare between us. “I refuse to file another elegant account of what should have been saved. I will not become the man who calmly explains how corruption triumphed. Not this time.”

Her eyes brighten with unshed tears.

I step closer, giving her every chance to pull away. “For most of my life I believed accuracy was the highest duty left to the living. Remember what fell. Preserve what failed. Name what was destroyed. That was how my people taught grief to behave. Now I think grief obeyed us only because we gave it nothing else to do.”

Lucy reaches for my hand. “You make sadness sound like a trained animal.”

“I am told my metaphors lack warmth.”