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"Someone lifted your towel out of the shop," I say. "Someone lifted your pillow out of your bedroom. If they can do that they can take a thread off her coat."
"But, you don't believe that?"
"My gut doesn't believe it." My voice comes out worse than I want. "But, my gut isn't evidence. I wasn't going to be the reason you lost her before I knew for sure."
She's quiet.
"Five days you held on to this," she says.
"Yes."
"You looked at me on those steps and wouldn’t tell me."
"I did."
"Don't do it again."
"I won't."
"I mean it, Gage." She finally looks up, and her eyes are wet but she's not crying.
"You want to hand me my own choices. Then hand me all of them. Even the ones that are going to hurt."
Ours is right, my wolf says. You were wrong.
I know.
“Okay. I promise.”
She gets up. Puts on my shirt and goes downstairs and stands in my kitchen in the gray light like she's waiting for something.
Then she looks up at the dead bulb over the sink.
It's been dead since the morning she blew every light on both houses. I've been meaning to change it for seven days.
She lifts a hand.
Her fingers stop about a foot short and to the left of it, off in the empty air over the counter, and hang there for half a second before they find the right place.
Then the bulb just comes on steady and warm, the whole kitchen goes gold at once.
"Huh," she says.
"That's a new one."
"First useful thing I've ever done." She's staring at it like it’s a miracle. "Everything else I do breaks."
She's had one hour of sleep and a bad night and I'm not going to make her explain her hands to me this morning.
Ask her, my wolf says.
Later.
Sid comes in through the flap, looks at the lit bulb, and sits down.
Finally. The bulb. Not the rest of it.
She makes coffee under her own light and asks me the question I've been dreading since yesterday afternoon.
