Sunny shook her head. “I know how much of it you meant. It’s all right.”

I looked up at her.

“Honest,” she said. So I believed her.

I stood up and sagged a little, and she caught my elbow.

“You want me to drive?”

“Ah. Yeah, I think you’d better.” I handed her the keys. “Who was the elf woman?”

She was helping me into the sidecar before she answered. “First Secretary of the House of the Weeping Birch. A commercial family with interests on both sides of the Border, and a reputation for being… intent on growth. Maybe at the expense of a few other things. It looks like Weeping Birch was Hawthorn’s backer. The next challenge is to prove they knew what they were backing.”

“I heard them talking, when I first showed up. It sounded as if she knew.”

I put my helmet on, sank back into my accustomed place, and pretty much passed out for the rest of the ride. I was too tired to feel more than an aching nostalgia about the change of drivers. I wasn’t worried; I knew it’d hurt like hell again later.

I slept on Sunny’s couch that night, in my clothes. Neither of us said anything about alternatives to the arrangement, either past or potential. I had a dream that Hawthorn’s last moments were a sad, sordid betrayal scene, and woke to the knowledge that, of course, it was true. Also incriminating, but by then that was almost beside the point. Sunny roused me up just before I could absolutely swear that the little silver knife had been the murder weapon. The omission wouldn’t bother anybody, and it certainly didn’t bother me. Eventually, I would describe the dream to a roomful of solemn people, some of whom were taking notes. It’s in the court records, if anyone wants the details. I don’t have any taste for repeating them here.

Chapter 12. Getting On with It

I moved my furniture back in, every piece of it in a different place from the one it had been in before… before. Then I rendered the whole effort pointless by spending most of my time at Tick-Tick’s. I was housecleaning there, too, boxing up the things I didn’t plan to keep, sorting the things I did, and in between, stopping in the middle of whatever I was doing and staring at nothing until something brought me back to the present. By the second day of housecleaning, people began to figure out where to find me; then the interruption of the trancelike state would often be a friend dropping by with a little food, an offer of help, and a couple of words that, if they didn’t make anything better, at least gave me an excuse for talking out loud. Yoshi showed up, around mid-morning of that second day after Hawthorn’s death, with a cheesecake.