“I’m more than you think.” This is what began to catch my attention. That he’d say this to Liro, that he’d speak so openly about himself and his gifts…it was a shock to me. “You don’t always notice,” he said. I drank more of the water, but I watched them now. Contained and separate, but only barely so, and still under the threat of a broken wall, I watched them.

“Dirva, you got trained,” Liro said. There was a gentleness in his voice. “You’ve not trained him deep enough.” Dirva said nothing. He sighed. Liro took him by the arm and turned him slightly away from me. “You can’t keep pretending you’re not yourself. I know you never liked it, and hell, I wished you’d not left, but Vathorem was good for you. The way you came back…Dirva, you needed it. You were right to go. Give this kid what you got,” he said. He said it quickly, it a tight, low voice.

Dirva gently pulled his arm away. “You have never been good at taking your own advice.”

“This is not about me.”

“And it’s not about Ariah, either.”

A taut, cold anger lashed through Liro. It filled him up and spilled out into the room. I winced. “Yeah, all right, well, let’s talk on what this is about then.”

“He has problems with walls, Liro.”

Liro swallowed. The muscles of his jaw twitched. He fought it back down. I drank more water. “We have to do this in front of your boy? Really, we do?”

“I can’t send him out in this state.”

“Did you bring him here, Dirva?”

Dirva didn’t answer. The silence was damning. Liro crossed his arms against his chest. There was a bottled bitterness in him that had me half-undone again. “This kid, you’re using him as a shield. This kid, he waited for you, and he broke himself down for you, and you are toying with him. It ain’t right, Dirva. You know it’s not right.”

The wall burst. I felt everything. I felt the loss, and I felt the guilt, and I felt the love and the hope and the tenderness and the wounds. I felt it all, and I felt it as a broken mess, and I couldn’t tell what belonged to whom or where I began and they ended. I lost a sense of time.