Carlos rose to his feet from the chair he’d occupied and turned toward the door. “I shall ask Nelia for more bandages.”
He left us alone in the quiet room and I looked up at Quinton, fighting to keep my heavy eyelids open.
“Are you all right?” Quinton asked, watching me with clear anxiety.
“Hand’s better,” I whispered.
“It still looks bad but not like something from a train wreck anymore,” he said. “I can’t say I’m pleased with Carlos about it, though. Something felt . . . weird about that.”
I tried to laugh but didn’t make it past a snort.
Quinton started to smile. “All right, how ’bout one snort for ‘you’re imagining things’ and two for ‘you may have to challenge him to a duel’?”
This time I did manage to laugh.
“I’m sorry. That sounded like ‘You’re imagining that I want you to challenge him to a duel and die tragically.’”
“Never,” I said, my vocal cords having received a small benefit from whatever Carlos had done, as well. “Showing off.”
“Me or Carlos?”
“Him.”
“What sort of showing off are we talking about here? Because I’m grateful for the healing thing, but if he’s been messing around in your head . . .”
“No. My head’s fine. Funny that you’re still jealous.”
“Of a dead guy? I am not.”
“Liar.”
“All right. I am jealous of someone who has a connection to you that I can’t have. And I’m jealous of the time I haven’t been able to spend with you while I was chasing after my father, giving in to my own obsessions instead of being with you. I’m envious of my sister. She has a family and a home, and she can hold her loved ones close and be with them all the time, wherever and whenever she wants. And I wish I had that. I hate what I’ve done in leaving you alone and I wish I’d quietly broken Dad’s neck when you weren’t looking last year.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Why? If he’d died, none of this would have happened.”
“You’ve said that before, but we can’t know that, and you would have become a man who had murdered his own father in a fit of rage.”
“But I still think the world would be better off if he were dead.”
“I agree, but a year ago, you weren’t thinking of the world. You were caught in your own fury and fear. If you had killed him, your remorse and your horror at what you’d done would have torn you to pieces. What’s happened is terrible and I feel for your sister and her kids, but you can’t preempt every atrocity in the world by perpetrating more—that’s the route your father has taken. It would be unwise for you to be the instrument, no matter how necessary his death may become. You don’t need the guilt and you would carry it forever. I know you. It would weigh you down even more than knowing the end results of what you did for the government does now. I want you to be free of that, but I can’t take it away and you would never let yourself off that hook, so don’t put yourself there. Let someone else carry the guilt.”
“You?”
“No. I think he ought to be dead, but I won’t be the one to do it. He is very ill. Rui and his plans may be all it takes. Let him go.”
“I will. I’ll have to work on it, but I will. I would rather hold on to you.” He looked at me as if asking permission, and the colors around his body were fluttering, unsure.
“Right now?” I asked, feeling there was something that pressed on his mind that he was afraid to say, and was trying to get around to, or escape from somehow.
“Yes.”
“All right,” I said.
He pulled me closer into his lap, swinging my legs over so I was snuggled sideways to his body. I nestled my cheek into his shoulder and, in spite of the topic, I wished I could purr with the contentment of being quiet in his arms. Quinton wrapped those arms around me and we sat like that for a while, me listening to the reassuring constancy of his heartbeat at rest.
After a time, he pressed his cheek against the top of my head. “I love you so much,” he said, “and ever since I saw you again in the doll hospital, I can only view the world in the context of you. Every step I take without you beside me or in front of me seems like wasted motion. I feel you in my heart like a separate but indivisible part of me. Not just the magic thing; the everything. If you died, I wouldn’t know how to live. I would be like an old-fashioned watch that had lost its spring. I never want to be far from you again.”
An electric wariness tingled over my nerves. “What if I didn’t die, but I couldn’t be with you? What if we had to be apart for a while through no desire of our own?”
“Like this past year? Are you hinting at something I should know . . . ?”
“No,” I replied too quickly. “Just hypothesizing. But what if . . . ? Would you wind down and die?”
“No. Because I would know you were still in the world, still spinning the little gears of my existence, if from afar. I wouldn’t like it much, though.”
“I wouldn’t, either. I didn’t like this past year much at all.”
“Maybe we should do something about it.”
I made a small interrogative sound, confused and apprehensive about where he seemed to be leading the conversation. . . .
“This isn’t how I pictured this moment. . . .”
“What moment? What’s wrong with it?” I asked, startled, and twisting out of his lap to get a better look into his face.
He let me back away, but kept his gaze on me, his expression so soft and full of longing that tears pricked in my eyes. “Will you marry me? Harper? I want . . . us to be . . . together.”
“But we are.”
“Legally.”
I blinked at him. “You think you’re going to die.”
He stared and then broke out in startled, uncomfortable laughter. “No! If I thought that, I wouldn’t be asking. I know I’m supposed to do this differently—I’m supposed to get on one knee and have a ring and all that, but I suck at that kind of thing.”
“But . . . you’d be stuck with me. You’d be out in the open. Everyone would know how to find you and you’d never be able to hide again.”
“I don’t want to hide anymore. I think I’m too old for hide-and-seek.”
“What about your father?”
“What about him? When this is over—one way or another—he’s not going to matter anymore. It’s not about him—except what dealing with him has taught me about myself. About what I want and what I don’t want. Back at the agency—the other one—the field guys were all single because they were wild cards, mobile, replaceable . . . expendable. When a guy moved up, he got a desk job, got a house, got married, because now he was a real person with a real place in the world—not what we used to call a ‘wild dog’ with no permanence, born to roam, born to die. I want to be permanent. With you. Out in the open.”
I was panting and sweating, couldn’t answer him while I wrestled with a fear I hadn’t faced in years. I thought I wasn’t afraid of anything so paltry, but the impulse to flee that captivity and everything that I associated with it hadn’t quite let go of me, as regressive and stupid as it was.
Quinton frowned and leaned forward, reaching to brush my cheek and then pulling back, his eyes widening a little. “You’re panicking. Which I sort of understand. But you don’t have to. What I’m offering is not a prison and a wedding ring is not a shackle. You wouldn’t be my property. The only thing that would change between us would be the light.”