Chương 24: “June Asks About Before”

She asked on a Saturday afternoon, lying on her bed with her shoes still on, staring at the ceiling.

"Were you always like this?" He waited.

"Before, I mean. Before you were a rock. Were you always..." She moved her hand vaguely.

"You." He had no voice. But she had learned to read the quality of his silence the way you learn to read weather, the difference between the silence that meant no and the silence that meant not exactly and the silence that meant I'd rather not. This was the third one.

"You don't have to say," she said.

"I just wondered if there was a before-before. Like before the armies and the kingdoms and all that. If there was a time when you were just..." Another hand gesture.

"Not yet." Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. He sat on the windowsill. He thought about the young man by the fire on the second floor. Cold and underground. Not yet anything. The moment before the decision, which he now knew was a decision. He glowed, very faintly, once. It meant yes. She had learned this too.

"Was it bad?" she asked.

"The before-before?" He didn't answer for a long time. She didn't push. She just lay there looking at the ceiling, patient in the way she was patient with him, completely, without making him feel the wait. One glow. Yes. She nodded.

"Okay," she said. Just that. Not: I'm sorry, or: tell me about it, or any of the things adults say that are really requests. Just okay, which meant I heard you, and I'm not going anywhere, and you don't have to say more than that. He looked at her looking at the ceiling. He thought: she was nine years old. He thought: she had been this way the whole time and he was only now noticing. He thought: that was its own kind of memory he was going to need to sit with for a while.