But what choice did I have?

I sighed and nodded. "I just don't want to drag someone else into more trouble with me."

Charity muttered, "Let me think. Where have I heard that before?"

Shiro smiled at her, the expression both paternal and amused, and said, "I'll make the call."

I waited while Shiro made a call from the room that served as the family study and the office for Michael's contracting business. Charity stayed in the kitchen and wrestled a huge Crock-Pot onto the counter. She got out a ton of vegetables, stew meat, and a spice rack and set to chopping things up without a word to me.

I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.

I fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.

Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn't say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.

"I worry about him," she said.

I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.

"I don't even know when he'll be home tonight."

"Good thing you have a Crock-Pot," I said.

"I don't know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I'd feel so lost."

What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn't cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. "He'll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him."

"He's been hurt three times, you know."

"Three?" I asked.

"Three. With you. Every time."

"So it's my fault." My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. "I see."

I couldn't see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. "It isn't about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you're around, my husband, my children's father, gets hurt."

The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. "Ow," I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can't tell, with cuts like that, how bad they're going to be until you see how much you're leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn't bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, "Why didn't you get rid of me, then?"