“Have a seat?” Aristide opened his palm, indicating the dormer window adjacent to his chair.

Cyril didn’t accept the offer. “Why did you come here, Aristide?”

He made a show of checking his page number before he set the book aside. “I was invited.”

Cyril shook his head. “No. Why did you really come?”

Aristide looked at him, too intently. “Why did you?”

A question he had been trying not to ask himself. He could say Cordelia, but putting her name between them now felt cruel, to Aristide and himself and the memory of her chemically red hair, her laughter and her freckles. Her face when he’d pulled a gun in her dressing room. Her anger when he offered her an out.

And anyway, he knew she was only a part of it. Had he only come because Aristide asked him? Because he wanted to come home, and believed this might be it?

Had he come because some deeply buried part of his mind—a prideless, animal shard—knew that solitude in Liso would be a good excuse for slow suicide? Or perhaps not so slow. He no longer had a pistol; that had been taken during debrief. But he had the skills to find another, or some other method. Dying wasn’t hard.

That idiot shard that clung to life didn’t understand what he owed. But it was stuck deep, and it throbbed with longing.

His laugh, when it came, felt like being sick. “Are you in earnest? I wouldn’t have missed that dinner for all the world. Your cockmuff flirting with my brother-in-law, and all your quaint little childhood stories.”

Aristide blinked twice, surprised, and then said, “Quaint? Is that what you heard?”

“I never knew you were a country boy.” The snide sound of his own voice was familiar: the kind of disdain he dropped during an interrogation, when shame seemed the likeliest iron with which to break his subject. The only difference was that this time, he hadn’t used it on purpose. It had used him. “You shook that mud off your shoes and shined them.”

“Yes,” said Aristide. “Your point?”

“Why tell her? All of them? Why now, tonight, and never—?” He stopped himself, just, with the quick application of fingernails to palm. He was losing his footing, yanked along by hurt like a rider dragged behind a frightened horse. He should not have opened this door.

“So that’s what this is about.” Aristide fussily rearranged his blanket. “Do you want to know what I didn’t tell them? Would it make you feel better to know just a little more about me than your sister does?”

“Never mind,” said Cyril, reaching for the doorknob. “I don’t—”