Page 12 of Ward

It’s thirty, actually.

DAD:

Then he’s further out than most. Pack a thermos.

She turned the comm face-down on the counter and sat grinning at the plant like an idiot for a while.

She ignored the grin, washed her mug, and went to bed.

The thing about not chasing was that the station did the work for you.

He was everywhere food was, and therefore everywhere she was; she hadn’t arranged the station’s floor plan.

Midday: corner table, the reworked braise, and she watched the metronome stutter on the first bite — one full second of stillness, that little recalibration, like the deck moving under him — and awarded herself the point.

Evening: seventh bell precisely, and Renn had started plating his tray unasked, because Renn adopted strays too, it was why they worked.

The day after: the delegation booked the private dining room for a negotiation lunch, and she catered it. He stood on the wall by the door for two hours while she came and went with courses, and every time she passed him she said nothing at all, which she could feel unsettling him more thoroughly than any campaign could have.

Because that was the discovery, the delightful engineering fact of the man: he was braced everywhere. He walked into every room pre-loaded for pressure.

Flattery, curiosity, fear, matchmaking, gossip — he was braced for anything a station might aim at a big, scarred alien guard. She could see it in how he stood.

What he had no preparation for was a person treating him like a Tuesday.

She treated him like a Tuesday because that was how she treated everyone. Species, rank, mood: everybody ate. The Charro honeymooners got the same warmth as the surly dock chief, who got the same warmth as the Paxian grandfather. Same as the enormous amber-eyed problem at the corner table, and she watched her lack of special treatment hit him, day after day, like a code he couldn’t break.

He kept checking for the angle. She could see him doing it. What does she want. Everyone wanted something; that was clearly the physics his whole world ran on.

And the days went by and she wanted — the special count. A yes or no on portions. Whether he’d noticed the smoke.

She field-tested one of Re-lee’s conversation topics on him once, mostly to see what would happen, the way you poke a tide pool.

He was at the pass collecting his tray, third day of the arrangement, and she said, in her portions voice, without preamble: “Topic seven. What’s a sound that means home to you?”

His expression shifted to the checked-instrument flatness of a man being read his rights.

She blinked and smiled. “It’s from the card. Re-lee writes them herself. I’m asking everybody today — Renn said ‘four pans at once,’ Dot said ‘proofing cabinet,’ the grandfather said something that broke the translator, we think it was a specific bell from a specific temple. You don’t have to answer. It’s not a checkpoint.”

He stood there with his tray for a moment, visibly declining to answer, and she was already turning to the next tray when he said, stiffly, to a point somewhere over her left shoulder:

“Rain on a roof while a house argues about dinner.”

Then he walked to the corner table with the metronome fully engaged, leaving her with a ladle and a piece of intelligence so specific, so obviously unguarded, that she had to stand in the walk-in for a minute and grin at the shelving.

A house that argued about dinner. Plural, loud, warm. He’d had one once, and whatever had happened since, some part of him still filed that noise under home.

Tisha came out of the walk-in and doubled his roots without one shred of professional justification.

“You did something to it,” he said, on the fourth day, at the pass, stiffly, unprompted, like a man reporting a security anomaly. “The braise. It’s different than the first night.”

“Smoked the marrow bones before they went in.” She kept wiping down the pass, easy, no eye contact, church-quiet inside with the effort of not whooping.

He’d noticed on day one.

He’d been tracking it for four days.

He’d cracked. “Better or worse?”