Page 10 of Ward

Then one leave day he turned up at their door with a wooden crate he'd built himself, lined and latched, sized exactly to her mother's stew pot.

For the move, he said. They were shipping out in a month. He'd measured the pot at some point.

Nobody ever figured out when.

You didn't chase men like that.

Chasing made them brace harder.

You just kept being there. Kept the pot on.

Let them discover, at their own pace, that the door had been open the whole time.

Also — and this was important — you were allowed to have fun doing it.

Calling him Eric helped.

Eric was a game she could enjoy for thirty days.

Aldric was the man inside it, and she was not ready to ask what she wanted from him on day thirty-one.

So she loaded a plate for Eric. Cinnamon roll, center of the tray, the kind with structural integrity issues from carrying too much frosting. She walked it out through the hall at her regular pace, refilling a Paxian bowl on the way because the grandfather was doing his polite starvation thing again, and arrived at the corner table like a scheduled delivery.

“Morning,” she said, setting the plate down beside his tray. “On the house. We over-proofed the batch.” They had not over-proofed the batch. The batch was perfect. “You want the special at midday? It’s the braise again but I’m doing something to it. It’s going to be a special one today.”

The amber eyes came up slow, wary, tracking her the way she’d seen security people track an unattended bag.

“That’s not necessary,” he said.

“Nothing I do is necessary. That’s what makes it food and not fuel.” She tucked her hands in her apron pocket, pleasant, unhurried, taking up exactly as much space as she always took. “So. Special: yes or no. I’m counting portions.”

A pause.

She watched him search for the trap and fail to find one.

“Yes,” he said, like a man conceding a fortress.

“Great.” She was already turning. “Midday, then. Eric.”

The pause behind her had a texture to it. She’d have paid money to see his face and it was better — genuinely better, artistically better — not to look. She refilled the grandfather’s bowl a second time on the way back, and the old Paxian said the thing about the sauce’s authority again, and behind her, in the corner, that Dalgurian guard sat in front of a cinnamon roll he had absolutely no protocol for.

He ate it, though.

She confirmed at the next pass-sweep: plate empty. There was no honorable unit of cinnamon roll to leave behind.

Checkmate, she thought, sunnily, and went back to her smoke.

The data card got its formal review that night, at her tiny counter, with the plant presiding and a mug of the good tea.

COMPATIBILITY SUMMARY: TISHA / ALDRIC.

Below that was a number she had to read twice, because she’d catered agency mixers for two years and had absorbed enough matchmaking shoptalk to know what the usual numbers looked like, and this was not one of the usual numbers.

“Huh,” she told the plant.

The summary itself was Re-lee all the way down — radiant taxonomy, categories like Complementary Load-Bearing and Warmth Differential (Resolvable) — but the logic underneath was sound, and the cheerful machinery saw more than Tisha expected.

PARTY ONE ORIENTS TO PLACE.