The first fact warred with the second, and won. I couldn’t lie there staring at somebody else’s ceiling all day, the way I could have if it had been my ceiling. But I thought about the logistics of it, and felt a whole new reluctance to get up. My clothes were on the back porch, and my borrowed robe was in the living room. I hadn’t realized before just how much ambiguity there was in going naked in the house of a woman you’d just had sex with for the first time, who you might be in love with but who you were pretty sure was not in love with you.

I worked up enough courage to slink out into the hall. There were noises coming from the kitchen, but I made it to the living room and got the robe on without seeing her. The white one was still on the floor.

I headed for the kitchen, trying to make a little noise myself. “Good morning,” said Sunny. “There’s coffee left over.” She was dressed: gray pants, a green Boiled in Lead T-shirt, and her shoulder holster. Fully armored.

“You’ve had less sleep than me.” Now that was clever. What the hell had I been trying to say?

She shrugged. “Messenger came this morning.” She poured a cup and handed it to me.

“Where from?” I asked, before it occurred to me that if she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. “Never mind.”

She seemed to think about it for a second before she said, “Ms. Wu sent a note. She thinks Linn’s come through the worst of it.”

I looked into my coffee cup and throttled my most primitive worst instinct, and said, “I’m glad.” She had seen my friend die, and knew that hers might, as well—might already have died, and the word not reached her yet. Tick-Tick’s death and the threat of Linn’s had been in the mix last night, in the place where my grip on Sunny met her grip on me. Now she could stop being afraid, and I could try not to think, Why does her friend get to live, when mine died?

“I know,” she said, in the matter-of-fact voice she’d been using all morning, and I got the feeling she wasn’t answering what I’d said out loud.

I fetched my clothes in off the line and put them on in the bathroom. The jeans were still damp around the waistband, but they’d warm up, if they didn’t actually dry.

“Breakfast?” Sunny asked when I came out.

I tried to imagine sitting across the table from her, the effort involved in not crying and not saying any of the wrong things. “I don’t think so. What do you need me to do today?”