“Please, no,” he snapped, knowing where she was going. From a certain perspective, it made the most sense that Cora had thrown herself in the Potomac, and her body just hadn’t been found yet. It wasn’t even that he wasn’t willing to accept the possibility; it was that he couldn’t. His brain wouldn’t allow it. “Please, not now.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” he said bitterly, jamming his electric razor into his toiletries bag. As a rule, he always had one ready to go, so packing for trips, international or domestic, rarely took him more than a few minutes.

But this was different. This time, he didn’t know if he would be coming back.

“I didn’t mean to snap at you like that,” he said, shaking fingers fumbling through the lotions and face wash he liked, checking to see which ones were less than three ounces. “I know it’s a possibility. I can’t humor it, not right now.”

Paris didn’t answer him, and then came the guilt. He’d never taken that tone with her before. He decided that the lotions weren’t worth the time or attention; he might not come back, but hopefully one day he would, and even if he didn’t, they were bound to open a Lush in Reykjavik one of these days.

“Kaveh?”

The voice was so small and squeaky it took him a moment to place it as Paris’s voice, and he knew something was terribly wrong. He dropped his hand lotion into the sink, dashed through his bedroom and back into the living room, and nearly had a heart attack on the spot.

Paris was sinking into his couch in calcified horror, her ombre waist-length braids draped over the back of his white couch like a hand as she looked up at the apparition standing over her. There was Nikola, in the middle of his living room, regarding Paris as if she were a guest at a party he hadn’t been properly introduced to yet. Kaveh clutched a hand to his chest, released a breath that was more of a cough.

“Nik,” he whispered, stumbling toward him. Nikola crouched so that their eyes were almost level to each other, and Kaveh practically grabbed the sides of his head, pulling his muzzle to his forehead, allowing himself a moment to wallow in the relief that he was still alive, that he was still here, and that he seemed, for the moment at least, not to be medicated.

“Oh, Nik,” he said, looking up into his eyes. Then he realized why Nikola was silent. “Oh, you’d been gone for weeks! I took the earbuds out. Hold on, let me go get them.”

He looked at Paris, who was looking at him with a quizzical sort of horror. “Don’t worry. He’s harmless. Mostly harmless.”