I regretted it the instant it was out of my mouth. Pain moved her features. She shook her head a little on the pillow. “A Triumph Spitfire. The dearest things—part of their value is that they cannot last.” Then her eyes squinted open again, and she grinned. “Blessed Mab, what an awful thing to say at such a time.”

I clenched my hands on the chair arms. “Sunny wouldn’t mind.”

“Sunny be damned. You know what I meant.”

“Stop it.”

She closed her eyes and frowned. “If you mean to be mealy-mouthed, go away and send the nurse back in. I did not wish for your company so that I could share in a lie.”

“The middle of the night is always the worst time for sick people. You’ll be pretty damned embarrassed about this in the morning.”

“You are wasting time, and I at least have very little of it. Stop playing the fool.”

The Daughters of Brede was hardly like a hospital at all: no bright, hard lights, no hushed terrors, no smell of pain and death, none of the things that Bolt Street Clinic couldn’t help but remind me of. But pain and death could still enter here, and the people who had to sit helpless and watch them come felt just the same, wherever they did it.

“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.”