Chapter Eighteen: The Distance Between Two People Who Love Each Other

My next home day falls three weeks later, and I spend the walk to the grain exchange composing, in my head, an entire account of everything that's happened since I last saw him — the stolen documents, Marisol's careful watchfulness, Corin's four whispered words at breakfast, the particular cold weight of understanding that the Institution's failures run deeper and older than I'd ever let myself imagine. I am so full of it, so eager to finally set the weight of it down in front of someone who isn't bound by the same careful walls as everyone inside the Hall, that I don't notice, at first, how quiet Theo is when I climb through onto the roof.

"You're distracted," he says, once I've finished the first breathless rush of it — the Ashworth file, the restraint marks, Mira Vellamy's buried pattern — and something in his tone makes me stop mid-sentence and actually look at him properly for the first time since I arrived.

"I'm telling you what we found."

"I know what you're telling me." He's sitting with his back against the low wall, arms loosely around his knees, and there's a careful distance in his posture tonight that wasn't there last month, some deliberate space between us that I don't think either of us chose consciously but that sits there all the same. "I've been sitting here for twenty minutes listening to you talk about Corin, and Elias, and Marisol, and Instructor Perrin's suspicious footsteps in a corridor I'll never see, and I keep waiting for you to ask me a single question about my own month, and it hasn't come yet."

The words land harder than I expect them to, and for a moment I have nothing to say at all, caught somewhere between defensiveness and a slow, sinking recognition that he might be right.

"That's not fair," I say, finally, though even as I say it I'm not entirely certain I believe it.

"Maybe not." He looks out at the city instead of at me, lamplight catching the tired set of his jaw. "But it's true, Wren, and I don't know how to say it gently enough that it doesn't sound like I'm asking you to care less about what you found. I'm not. I know how much it matters. I know what it could mean, not just for us, but for people like Corin's sister, for anyone the Institution's ever quietly decided wasn't worth a second look." He finally turns to face me, and there's something raw underneath the careful control in his voice now, something that's clearly been building for longer than tonight. "I just don't know where I fit into it anymore. A month ago you'd have told me about the archive and then asked me how the docks were, how my hands were healing, whether my father's noticed anything different about me. Tonight I had to ask you a direct question just to get a single one back."

I open my mouth to argue and find, to my own surprise, that the argument doesn't come. Instead what comes is something closer to shame, hot and sudden, because I think of my last three letters to him — dense with archive findings, with Corin's grief, with Elias's brother and I cannot, when I actually search my memory honestly, recall asking him a single real question about his own life in any of them.

"I'm sorry," I say, quietly. "You're right. I didn't even notice I'd stopped."

"That's what frightens me," he says, and his voice cracks slightly on the word, the first real crack I've heard in it in longer than I want to admit. "Not that you're doing this — I meant what I said, months ago, about wanting you to be dangerous to them instead of just patient. But I'm frightened that the thing you're becoming to survive in there is starting to feel more real to you than the thing we already had out here. I'm frightened that by the time you turn twenty-one, the girl standing in the Hall of Names won't need me the way I still need her."

The city spreads out below us, gold and indifferent, and for a long moment neither of us says anything at all, the silence between us heavier than any silence we've shared before, even the ones born out of fear of being overheard.

"I still need you," I say, finally, my voice unsteady. "Theo, I have been so frightened these past weeks, in ways I haven't let myself say out loud to anyone, not even in the letters and I think some part of me has been protecting you from that fear by burying you in facts instead, cases and documents and Corin's sister, because facts feel safer to hand you than I am terrified I am becoming someone I won't recognize by the time this is over." The admission costs me something, coming out of me in a rush I hadn't planned. "I didn't mean to stop asking about you. I think I've just been so afraid of drowning in what I'm finding that I forgot, some nights, that you're drowning in something too. Six days a week at the docks. A father who thinks you've been promoted into a harder life instead of exiled into one. I haven't asked about any of that in far too long, and I'm sorry, truly, more than I know how to say properly."

Theo is quiet for a moment, watching me, and something in his face softens, the careful distance in his posture easing by degrees. "My hands have mostly healed," he says, finally, a small, tired attempt at levity that doesn't quite land but that I understand, gratefully, as an offering all the same. "The foreman's stopped watching me as closely as he did the first few months. I think he's decided I'm either harmless or too tired to cause trouble, which amounts to the same thing from where he's standing." He looks down at his own palms, turning them over in the lamplight. "I think about you constantly. I think that's actually part of the problem — I have six days a week of hauling grain sacks with nothing to occupy my mind except worrying about what's happening to you in that building, and by the time I finally see you, I think I've built up an entire month's worth of fear that comes out sideways as something that sounds more like resentment than it actually is."

"It's not unreasonable," I say. "To be afraid of losing me to that place. I'm afraid of it too, some nights."

"I don't want to be someone who makes you feel guilty for fighting for us," he says, and there's real anguish in it now, the careful composure finally cracking all the way open. "That's the last thing I want, Wren. But I also don't know how to keep loving someone from twenty feet away in a loading yard, and from six weeks between rooftops, and from letters that read more like case files than love letters, without some part of me starting to wonder if the version of you that survives this whole ordeal is still going to want the same life we used to talk about before any of this started."

The question sits between us, enormous and unanswerable in any way that would actually satisfy either of us tonight, and I find myself reaching for his hand instead of for words, because some things, I am beginning to understand, aren't solved by explanation. They're only survived, together, one honest admission at a time.

"I don't know who I'll be by twenty-one," I say, finally, my voice barely above a whisper. "I wish I could promise you I'll be exactly the same girl who climbed up here for the first time three years ago. I don't think that's true, and I don't think it would even be a good thing if it were, because that girl didn't know what she knows now, didn't understand what this system is actually capable of hiding. But I know this much, Theo, and I need you to believe it even when the letters get too dense with facts again, even when I forget to ask about your hands: whoever I am by the end of this, the reason I'm becoming her is you. It has always been you. Every reckless, frightening thing I've done since the night on this roof has had your name underneath it, even when I forget to write it down."

He pulls me against him then, slow and careful, his forehead resting against mine the way it always does when words have run out and only proximity is left to say the rest. We stay like that a long while, neither of us speaking, the city's lamplight moving slowly across the sky as the hour grows later than either of us means to let it, and when he finally speaks again, his voice is rough but steadier than it's been all evening.

"Ask me about my day next time," he says, quiet, almost teasing, though I can hear how much he means it underneath the lightness. "Even if it's just for a minute, before the archives and the documents and Corin's whole tragic family history. I'll take one minute, Wren. I just need to know I still exist to you as more than someone waiting at the end of it."

"One minute," I promise. "Every letter. I swear it."

He kisses me then, slow and certain, and for the first time all evening the distance between us finally closes entirely, and I understand, held against him with the city glittering indifferently below, that this — the fight, the fear underneath it, the honest, unglamorous work of two frightened people trying to stay found to each other across an ever-widening gap is its own kind of stolen hour, no less precious for being difficult, no less worth fighting for than any of the easier ones that came before it.

I don't tell him, walking home well past curfew that night, about the particular cold thought that follows me the whole way back that if love this determined, this honestly fought for, can still nearly slip away simply from distance and distraction and fear, then perhaps the Institution's confidence in its own resonance readings is built on a premise even more fragile than I'd already begun to suspect. That perhaps the difference between a bond that survives and one that doesn't has very little to do with any number a basin of silver could ever produce, and everything to do with two people choosing, again and again, however imperfectly, not to stop asking about each other's days.