I turned around, braced both hands behind me on the counter, swallowed hard, and said, “Yes, it did.”

She regarded me gravely, her hands deep in the pockets of the gray linen jacket. “But if that’s so, what if it never happens again?”

Ouch? I think so. 1 think that’s what that is. “Then I guess it doesn’t. So I should stop holding my breath, huh?”

She looked past me to the window, with the not-seeing-much expression I was coming to know. “That night, neither of us had much chance to consider it beforehand. It was something that happened to us more than something we did. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to do a little thinking now.”

I felt as if something was slipping away from me, very gently. “No problem.”

Sunny chuckled, a real, full-throated, genuinely amused one. I stared at her. “ ‘Ye lie, ye lie, ye false’—I don’t remember the rest of the verse. I tell you what: In six weeks I’ll come around and take you out to dinner, and we can talk about it then. How’s that?”

I swallowed again, and wondered if it could be good for one’s insides to be made to feel like a volleyball in motion. “Deal.”

She went to the door and glanced back over her shoulder at me. “Now I’ll go tell Yoshi you’re in jail.”

“Bad cop,” I croaked. “Go lie down by your squad car.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Get a haircut.”

By the time she got downstairs into the street, I had my voice back. I sprinted up three platforms to the front window and yelled, “I’m growing it out!”

•

Late that afternoon, Tick-Tick’s brother arrived on her doorstep.

The first news I had of it was a voice with an Elflands accent down in the street calling, “Excuse me? Hello, the—the building. Is someone there?”

Damn, had everybody else in the place gone out? And one of them must have closed the front door. I bounded to the window again and stuck my head out.

He looked like her. It almost undid me. I would never have mistaken him for her, but you could see her in the straight, rather high-bridged nose, the long eyes, the undercut lower lip.

He called up, “Is this where—” He dropped his chin to his chest for just an instant, then tipped his head back again to look at me. “Is this where the one who called herself Tick-Tick lived?”

“You’re her brother.”

He seemed surprised. “Yes. I was—I am.”

“Come on up,” I told him, and pulled the ring that unlatched the door.

“This way,” I called over the balcony railing when he came into the atrium, and after that let him find his own way up. He stood in the doorway half timid, half arrogant, and each one made the other harder to deal with, I bet.