Is this about meat buns again?

Yeah probably.

Anyway, why are you asking?

I just . . . I think it might be a bit the same as the army.

Lissa didn’t say anything, just sat and waited, the little glowing phone in her hand, the center of her world right then. And Cormac poured it all out, typing as if his life depended on it, his spelling all over the place. Telling her about the hideous injuries, the pointless pain, the children caught in the cross fire; the waste of all of it. How he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop worrying about it. How he had come home, and his mother was ashamed of him, and he felt like a coward for leaving his comrades. She read it all, patiently and carefully. And at the end of it, she typed just two words.

I know.

And she signed it off with a kiss. And Cormac held his phone to his chest, close, just as, five hundred miles away, Lissa was doing exactly the same thing, as if they were holding each other’s hearts in their hands.

Chapter 57

Oh, the luxury, the rare luxury, of waking on a sunny Sunday morning with nothing to do and someone else to think about.

Once upon a time this would have made Lissa panic. She would have felt lonely and worried that she was living in the center of the greatest city in the world and not making the most of it. She would have been entirely concerned that she was wasting time, desperately checking her Insta to see if her friends had been up to something fun that she would have wanted to go to; pinging her mates immediately to see if anyone was up to anything, while trying not to look too needy; worrying if her mother was coming into town, who would want to complain about her hair or her living conditions, or why she didn’t just look at these brochures for research chemistry—she’d been so good at chemistry at school, and there were all sorts of interesting careers that could spin off it now, it wasn’t just in labs you know, you could travel all over the world . . .