Pairing with Galen: why had she done it? Cruel in a way, because he wasn’t a bad person; it was hardly his fault that she didn’t love him, or even much like him, not anymore. A bluff. That’s what it had been. To jar Theo out of his gloom. And when she’d said to him that night on the Wall, Maybe I just will marry Galen Strauss, and Theo had said, All right, if that’s what you want, I only want you to be happy, the bluff had hardened into something else, something she had to do, to prove that he was wrong. Wrong about her, wrong about himself, wrong about everything. You had to try. You had to act. You had to get on with things and make do. A feat of stubbornness, that’s what it was, marrying Galen Strauss, and all for Theo Jaxon.

For a time, most of that summer and into the fall, she had tried to make the marriage work. She had hoped she could will the right emotions into being, and for a while she had almost done it, simply because the sheer fact of her existence seemed to make Galen so happy. They were both Watch, so it wasn’t like they saw each other all that much or kept any kind of regular hours; it proved, in fact, pretty easy to avoid him, because he was on the day shift most of the time, a subtle but unmistakable comment on the fact that he had come up last in his grade, and with his eyes the way they were, no good in the dark. Sometimes when he looked at her, squinting like he did, she wondered if in fact she was the girl he really loved at all. Maybe it was some other woman he saw, one he had made up in his mind.

She’d found a way to almost never let him near her.

Almost: because you couldn’t not lie with your husband. Is he tender with you? her mother had asked her. Is he kind? Does he care about what’s happening to you? That’s all I want to know. But Galen was too happy to be tender. I can’t believe it! his face and body said. I can’t believe you’re mine! Which she wasn’t; while Galen huffed and puffed above her in the dark, Mausami was miles away. The harder he tried to be a husband, the less she felt like a wife to him, until—and this was the bad part, the part that didn’t seem fair of her—she’d found herself actually disliking him. By the first snowfall she’d caught herself imagining she could close her eyes and simply wish him off the face of the earth. Which only made Galen try harder, and left her disliking him even more.