“Orient?” she said. “I didn’t mean to scold.”

I took her hand. I’d known I would, eventually, and I’d known that when I did, it would be to acknowledge the thing I didn’t want to know, to let in the word I’d tried not to hear. I swallowed and said, “Never mind.”

“ ‘All that has been mine is yours to keep, to guard, or give away.’ “ She drew an uneven breath. “There. That’s binding, you know.”

“I know.”

“All those tools you haven’t the faintest notion how to use.” She grinned again.

“And your apartment for mountain goats.”

“And my curious furniture.”

“I like your furniture.”

Her grip tightened on my fingers. “I meant what I said, my dear. This is my home. These are my people. You are more to me than any brother of my blood. I have no regrets.”

I do, I wanted to cry out, I have enough for both of us. Don’t leave me. “I’ll remember,” I said.

“It’s well,” Tick-Tick announced. “I am satisfied.”

Sunny was prying my hand away, gently, one finger at a time. It prickled as the circulation came back. The room was colder than it had been when I’d come in, and a little brighter, too. Sunny had turned the wick up on the remaining lamp. “Stand up,” she said, and I realized I’d been sitting for a very long time. She half-lifted me out of the chair. “Come on,” she ordered, and I followed where she pulled me. After a little walking she made me sit down again, and put something in my hands and told me to drink it.

Coffee—very good coffee. Cops always know where to find it when the rest of the town is short. There were no beds in this room, only chairs and a couch and a square table with folding chairs pulled up to it. There were scattered playing cards on the table, and two coffee cups. It looked like a nurses’ break room, and looked, too, as if Sunny might have chased a few of them out of it.

A seedybox was playing softly in the corner, “Bonnie Barbry-O” by… what was the name of that band? Bards of a Feather. Clever name. I carried my coffee cup over to the window. Such a good version, pretty and mournful, and that low bass harmony on the refrain like something out of a South African men’s chorus, singing, “Bid a fond farewell—”

It was raining. What a melodramatic piece of work. It wasn’t any better than Tick-Tick’s comment on the passing of precious things—

Oh, hell, out of coffee—

“You should try to stop crying. You’ll dehydrate,” Sunny said from somewhere behind me.

“I’m not crying.”

“Oh,” she said.

She took the coffee cup out of my hands and replaced it with a full one. Then she managed to catch it again before I dropped it. God forbid, I thought, gripping a fistful of the window drapes in each hand, God forbid that we should waste precious things.