Aberrant

11. Sunny Days That I Thought Would Never End

"No, pert is not the word, apart from being cliche. And pendulous is way off. Springy – I like springy."

He lay sprawled on the picnic table, wielding his cane like a shotgun to pick off birds far up in the sky that blithely ignored being shot and winged away across the park. Wilson sat on the bench with his back to him, flung open to the feeble sun. It was March; winter was decomposing into a memory.

"I think you should bring her to lunch in the cafeteria some day."

"It would scare everyone into staying off my case for a while, wouldn't it? They'd probably think she'd turned me and I was working for CA now. However -" He gave up on the birds, flipped lazily onto his side and targeted the back of Wilson's head. "No one brings a woman like Ailyn McCullough anywhere. She goes where she wants."

"Still popping in and out of your life?" Wilson, as usual and without rancor, had stuck his finger in the sore place.

"It's not like that." He shrugged, a ludicrous gesture with one shoulder flattened against the table, useless because Wilson couldn't see it. Right, try to shrug it off. "She just…still wants to keep it secret."

He had told Wilson everything, soon – very soon – after that first night, needing to get it out, his only friend as always the perfect repository for all the things he could say nowhere else, just stuffing it in there, while the good doctor's eyebrows rose to make room for it all behind the not-so-surprised eyes. It was no betrayal of Ailyn's need for secrecy; Wilson was the soul of discretion whenever he knew the matter was serious. What he couldn't convey to him was how insane it had become, the sex all-encompassing, crazy-making, still snatched furtively – or so it seemed, though it could devolve into hours – once or twice a week, his place or hers (her apartment always making her more nervous, convincing him it was not him she felt was being watched but rather herself), going at it sometimes almost as soon as the door closed behind them, as vigorous as the proverbial minks, every metaphor apt right down to the one about coming up for air. He felt like he was sex-walking through the rest of his life, hair mussed, clothes probably buttoned wrong, a person constantly caught or almost caught in the act, fairly daring anyone to notice the difference in him, the fact that they didn't perturbing him only to the extent that it showed how pathetic he had been before for other reasons. And yet it wasn't all about the sex, this muddle-mindedness he found himself in. The sex in his life had always been a pleasure and an essential, fun and a release, in that order, but now some barrier was breaking down between it and the rest of him; the secluded hours with Ailyn were no longer a separate place where his body took what it needed and then came back to the world - the sex was a part of what he felt for her, entwining them, making something new. Bodies not going off to be separate again once they were finished with each other, but rather melded, all of her still there and a part of him afterwards in her smile against the pillow or the shape of her fingers around a coffee mug in the morning. He hadn't known that was possible.

With a hmppf Wilson turned, found the cane pointed at his face and tipped it away with one finger.

"So is it lust or is it love, House?

"I hate multiple-choice. Can I write you an essay?"

Was it lust? Certainly. Was it love? He had believed life no longer held that experience in waiting for him, not after Stacy. His after-Stacy era had been a long slide toward a future he assumed would be more of the same, pain and the torment of his memories; that old adage, by someone famous and dead, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, he had come to think was the other way around for him – those, like him, who could not repeat the past were condemned to remember it. Ailyn had changed that. Was it love? They never said the word. Seldom talked about themselves as a couple at all unless it involved their little non-disclosure agreement. They laughed and talked about seemingly everything but when he analyzed it later it was more like nothing. Getting-to-know-you, yes, getting-to-know-all-about-you, no. Her childhood came up glaringly short, the parents appearing only as background extras in the occasional anecdote, but then he wasn't big on the subject himself; if there had been abuse or some other trauma he could let her stay silent on it. Was it love? The word frightened the hell out of him. It was an imposter anyway, slipping into the disguise of anything the love-doped speaker wanted it to be. He felt…happy. When the key he'd given her rattled in his door late at night, the sound like a warm shot of booze in his blood, and she slipped in, wanting him, pulling him to the couch or the floor or the piano bench while they stripped and laughed, when she ran her mouth up his chest and he felt the nipple of one erect breast trailing after and on the other side nothing, then he thought he would burst with happiness because it was her, her body, given over to him, its scar like a badge, a new kind of symmetry become more perfect to him in its familiarity than the conventional one. His asymmetrical lover. It was happiness so immanent he knew he could not dissect it for fear it would slip away. It was easier to explain to Wilson his fears.

"For a long time," he began slowly (the oncologist had turned away, sensing his reluctance, giving him space), "the future was this long path leading nowhere. It was my future and there was no way to get off. I was headed toward…" He couldn't say what he had been headed toward. It was too terrible, and Wilson knew it anyway. "Now I've found a way off. I've gone off on a tangent."

"You needed to get off that path."

"That's why I'm staying on this tangent as long as I can." Maybe it leads out of the woods.

Down by the lake joggers rushed past on the way to their own futures. Wilson shook off the pensive moment first. "So –" He turned and slapped the table. "When do I get formally introduced? I'm thinking dinner, somewhere expensive, since you'll be forced to pay for once if you want to maintain that real-man image in front of her."

"We'll do it. Give me time. I'm not even seeing her today. She's up in New York, she needed a new prosthesis. The old one broke."

He had told Wilson Ailyn's medical history. The oncologist frowned. "That's rare. Those things are made to last. How –"

"We were playing catch with it." The memory made him grin.

For a quiet moment Wilson said nothing. "I'm so glad you're having fun, House." He snorted. "No, really. No sarcasm there." When he glanced up there was a new light in his friend's eyes. They both grinned, conspirators in his happiness. He turned onto his back and shot another bird with his cane, sound included kerboom, and then they were laughing.

****

Her heart wasn't in it.

She looked down at the desk strewn with notes that were supposed to be leads to the underground and John Galt and realized she had just written Darren Blackwell on the blotter and drawn angry-terrorist eyebrows over both a's. She didn't even remember doing it. Cops passed behind her, a stream of activity in the detail room, any one of them could have seen it, and she casually tore off the corner and wadded it to a hard bead before round-filing it. She was going a little crazy. Mistakes like that couldn't be allowed. She could pretend to work, passing on tidbits to the far-flung paper-trail team she'd been assigned to after Chase quit – no new partner to look over her shoulder made it easier - and she could even ignore her own pet project for a while, though the names on her secret list were apparently ready to pop out of her subconscious at any moment, but she couldn't pretend her heart was in any of it, when it knew the only case she cared about getting on top of would be waiting for her at his apartment that evening.

She felt her stupid-smile coming on again, the one that had been directing itself for weeks at blank walls and elevator doors that opened suddenly, and she buried her face in her notes as Charlie Dalton slumped into the chair across from her. "Guys at Tally's tonight," he proclaimed. He had made the same abbreviated proposal three Fridays running.

Useless to try and work. "Look, I've – got an appointment." She shoved the notes aside and found her jacket.

He was staring. "It's 4:30."

"So I'm taking off early. Cover for me, wouldya?" His gaze held hers for a moment too long, saying nothing.

And then she was hurrying up the steps of the brownstone, scanning the streets automatically for occupied cars, though her heart wasn't in that either, and he was opening the door, shirtless because he had been catching the dying rays filtered into the kitchen from his western-facing balcony while he cooked dinner, a rolled polpettone this time. She suspected he had never cooked in his life before he met her, his attempts so far all memorably unmemorable. The meatroll he was shoving into the oven looked like a leftover from one of his autopsies.

"Those delicate doctor's hands rolled that?" she chided.

He grinned without looking up. "I'll show you delicate after we've eaten."

"Oh why wait?"

She was always breathless. This moment, of touching him again, fingers smoothing the hairs on his chest while he pretended diffidence that lasted for maybe one second – it always felt like the first time. They were always coming at each other from the place they had started, from opposite corners in their boxer ring, moving at top speed and happily colliding.

"This meal won't take that long."

"Let it burn."

Then they were stripping each other, mouths and hands everywhere (always more hands than seemed possible, she would stop them some day and count but not now) and they ended up on the pile of their clothes on the floor. It frightened her how ready she always was for him. As though an earthquake shook her open, the cleft in her peeling back before he could even enter her, the rest of her reduced to rubble and smoke. A roar in her ears that was her own loud cry.

"What's that smell?"

"Blackened meatloaf. We've been down here forty minutes."

"No we haven't."

They were comfortable naked. Clothes were someone's bad invention. They ate naked and laughed at his stories from the hospital. She stood at the balcony door and said, "I'm going out there someday." They were so often a nudist colony of two that she had never even been out to admire his view.

"Not like that you're not. There's a dress code. As in, you have to be dressed."

She opened the door and stepped out.

"You don't know my neighbor," he murmured behind her, grinning. Only a flimsy partition separated his balcony from the next.

"The fifty-something starer with the Brylcreem abuse problem?"

"Not above spying through the chinks." He stepped out with her and they leaned to watch the quiet street below, leached of color by the dusk. "Is this you not being afraid of being watched?" he finally asked. She didn't know what to say. It's me being so happy I don't care. Or it was just inexcusable carelessness. He nudged her hip with his. "Ready for some new licks?"

He was teaching her to play the guitar. The wood against her bare stomach was as sensuous as his skin. She was hopeless at it, the kind of hopeless that as usual had them laughing so hard they couldn't go on, and as usual he left her stretched out on the sofa and slotted in some music that was going to show her what her ultimate learning goal was, Steve Cropper or Brian May. "Makes me wanna dance." She had closed her eyes. When she opened them he was gazing down at her.

"Can't see you as the dancing type, Greg." Queen coiled around them. She felt drunk and couldn't remember if they had drunk anything.

"I killed. I was the king."

Then she was up and they danced, rocker-wild, laughing, while he pumped the music louder with the remote. The contortions his leg necessitated gave a mondo cool to his thrashing movements and she dissolved into it, into him, she wasn't drunk she was tripping he had injected her with something of course he did she was eighteen again and the world was all right, it would go on forever head-banging against this wall of sound while they held each other up, laughing too hard to stand, and he called out incomprehensible commands like "Listen to that bent string!" The music was just music to her, buzzing now with an out-of-rhythm chord he hadn't taught her –

He cut the music. It was the doorbell.

"My neighbor!" he announced gleefully into the silence. "Come to complain about the noise." He stalked naked to the door and threw it open. "Mr. Sneider - here for a threesome?"

A glimpse of Brylcreemed hair and popping eyes too busy moving up and down Greg to pick her out in the background, before she dived for the couch face-down, stifling screams of laughter that missed Mr. Brylcreem's sputtered reply, only grasping Greg's "Can't a guy have some fun every five years or so?" and a slammed door.

She turned on her back and he straddled her, held her down. Her laughter reignited his, their gigglefests always threatening to never end.

"It could have been anyone, Greg" she finally gasped. "Someone from your work –"

" – someone from your work –"

" – or a carpet salesman. The guy's spooky."

"He's a hero. Saving the petrolatum industry single-handedly. Unless he smoothes it on with both hands."

"He tried to chat me up on the stairs last week. Think I should tell him I'm coming here to screw you?"

"Tell him you come here to be with me."

Relaxed, she didn't catch the earnest note in his voice. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sneider, I come here to screw Dr. House, not you," she incanted dreamily.

"You come here to be with me." His hands on her wrists beside her head had tightened, his face intent as though waiting to draw his next breath from her. "Say it."

She couldn't look away from him. So much in the little difference. It was simple. Like falling off a cliff. "I come here to be with you," she told him.

If you could fall upward then she fell off her cliff into him, his body meeting hers halfway, his cock engorged as though some dam had broken inside at her words, hard instantly, plunging into her. Such joy in his face. The pounding in her was a rock beat, but he had turned the music off, it was only her, the deeper person inside her thrumming to get out, threatening to explode. He was clumsy from his leg on the narrow sofa and she ended on top of him, both of them urgent as children, begging it out of each other until they collapsed. She lay with her head on his chest and listened to his heart, fast and wild as a gong reverberating, shaking everything, the heart of a world.

They lay for eternity without speaking, until the pulse beneath her ear settled, his chest a steady ocean swell, and she knew he was asleep.

Gently so as not to wake him she rose on one elbow. She liked to watch him sleep. His face had a peaceful aspect it almost never had when he was awake, all worry erased. Do I look like that when I'm asleep? She couldn't imagine it. Even when every other thought fell away, even in moments like this (when that happier person in her almost made it out through the chinks), she could reach up to her face and feel the pinched look she knew others spoke of as hard. No, there was a muscle she never unclenched entirely, no matter how relaxed she was, and it was seizing up even now. Remembering how she'd stepped out on his balcony. Remembering the odd looks when she left work early for the hundredth time. One more glance at his peace. She hated to ruin it.

She stirred enough to wake him. "Greg?"

"Hmmh?"

"Do you know how to shoot a gun?"

He came fully awake. She watched the creases return around his eyes. "My dad was Marine Corps." Yawn. "You can bet he made me learn."

"But you haven't in years, right?"

"Why?"

"I want to get you a handgun you can keep here. I'll take you to a shooting range so you can get some practice."

It was gravity pulling the lines of his face down. The look in his eyes was trust. "All right."

The dark was all there. They lay in the wash of car lights from the street below for a long time before she rose to get dressed.

****

How old are you?

Young, very young. It was as though being in love had reversed the process of aging within him. He felt energetic, a kid going through it for the first time. She took him to the shooting range (where he availed himself well, he thought, the admiration in her gaze like a caress) and it was fun, a word he had to roll around in his head for a while before recalling the meaning of. They fled for a three-day weekend to Atlantic City, screwing in the hotel room for hours and venturing out in the evening as a real couple among real people (they all think we're married, he had murmured to her across a fancy table the first night and she had looked back, calm and smiling, and said I know.) Every day with her made him younger. Time running backwards. By the time she assented to a dinner with Wilson, he figured he had regressed to the naive phase, all jumpy as a teenager inside preparing for the evening. It had to show in his face.

He half-expected the restaurant to card him.

Some change had come over her in the weeks as well. It might have been (he hoped) that she had seen what her secrecy was doing to him. And to them. Having her there one moment or weekend and always gone the next had jigsawed his life into a puzzle which – as stimulating as it was - he could no longer make sense of. It was a relationship seen by strobe, chopped up into brilliant bits and pieces of what it could be. It had made him fall into rhythms that sapped that energy he gained from being with her. During their Atlantic City weekend she mentioned how few Vicodin he seemed to take. Oh I make up for it in droves when you're not around, he had told her in all honesty, refraining from explaining how much more dangerous to the body that kind of on-off rhythm was than the regular overuse he had previously indulged in. Her long look had told him she already knew. And at some point afterward, without knowing exactly when, he realized she had stopped looking over her shoulder. Started coming around more often. Loosening up on her secrecy, not as though she had come to believe it wasn't a problem – more like she was resigned to fate.

A hand was flapping in front of his face. Wilson's. He scowled it down. Wilson and Ailyn were both grinning at him.

"The idea," Ailyn told him, "was that you would be here with us during the meal, Greg. Where did you just go?"

"My multitasking brain was curing cancer and finding a solution to world peace while you two – did your thing."

Far from the stilted, forks-clattered-in-embarrassed-silence affair he had imagined, the dinner was turning out amusing. Ailyn and Wilson had a lot in common, the lot being him, and they got along like opioids got along with his brain. They had paired off against him to mine it for all it was worth.

The first thing she had said to Wilson was, "I understand you guys are on your third marriage together," He had told her about their spats. The number seemed arbitrary. "We break up only to make up," was Wilson's reply.

"You can't cure cancer, House," the oncologist was saying now. "You'd put me out of a job." He winked at Ailyn. "This is that God complex of his, I suppose."

He was a little shocked. The wuss who had been too pussy-footed about CA to pick him up after his arrest seemed to have vanished. Or he had forgotten who he was joking with. But then Ailyn had forgotten who she was. He had never seen her face softer. Her job was a million miles away. She smiled at him, happy to be conspiring with Wilson to tease him. The two of them actually had their heads together, a let's-talk-about-him-as-if-he's-not-there pose. "It is a problem," she admitted. "Has he ever been to therapy?"

Wilson nodded and sighed. "Primal screaming hurt his throat, so he invented primal whining."

"I am not paying for this dinner," he informed them, "just to sit here and have my id bagged on by the likes of you two." Which, he realized, proved the point.

She leaned across the table, one finger on one of his. The tea-light candles seemed to have fallen into her eyes. "It's okay, Greg." She was only half-joking. "You can be my God anytime."

Once she had left to go to the ladies' room Wilson looked at him. "Didn't you once refer to her as Beauty or the Beast? Not much beast there."

"That was a long time ago." The early days in fact, when he had been trying to explain to Wilson how she seemed to switch back and forth between a come-hither sultry with him and her police mode. The thought seemed antiquated now.

Wilson had come down with a case of the stares. That x-ray vision again; he was being irradiated. "Do you ever wonder," Wilson's voice was milky, "if it's true what they say, that there's one person out there for everyone?" Don't go there. "Think she could be the one for you?"

Heat surged through him, the effect of gears grinding his mind to a halt before he could think it. He didn't want to think it. He shrugged instead. "This idea of there being one - and only one - person out there for you is a very egotistical concept. It presupposes that your thoughts and feelings are unique – that not one out of the thousands of people you've met in your life has had the capacity – the depth – to see that very special you for what you are."

"I've seen you for what you are," Wilson snorted into his drink.

"It's just not the romantic concept everyone thinks it is, to say there's one soulmate out there who will truly understand 'me'." He made the quote marks with his fingers. "It's about as arrogant and self-centered as you can get." He fiddled with his collar. Hot. "So – no, I do not think like that." Wilson waited. "I think – two people happen to find each other and it happens to click." Two people whose souls happened to mesh in so many ways you could no longer pull them apart. "Fate optional."

"What's optional?" Ailyn had rejoined them.

"The presence of one James Wilson, MD at our table. I'm thinking a digestive stroll for you and me while he picks up the tab."

She wasn't paying attention. She stared across the room, the change in her face so alarming he felt his pulse ratchet up a notch. He believed he knew her every expression, they had become a part of his dreams, but fear was a new one. "What is it?" he murmured.

She came out of the trance with a "Nothing," and raised her drink high in front of her face. It was so obviously a shield that it made him turn and try to follow her line of sight. A man at a window table was just turning away, dark hair, his own age maybe, laughing and chatting to the woman at the table with him. Customers lined the bar. A waiter caught his eye, thinking he needed serving. Any one of them could have triggered her panic button.

"So someone you know is here," he muttered. Ailyn was posing for a mug shot now, head turned away from the opposite corner almost ninety degrees, as though the restrooms behind her were fascinating, and who said they weren't. The next sound you hear is your evening flushing away. "Someone from work?" He couldn't keep the anger down. "Oh no, what are we going to do? If they see you with me, you're fucked." Wilson had found a stain on the tablecloth and was studying it intently. "Your career down the drain – why, they'll even take away your toys." She was shaking her head. "You'll have to start a home catering service with Chase."

"Just maybe," she whispered, the words directed at the restrooms so that he had to lean to hear, "just maybe this is more about you than you already so selfishly assume. Maybe I don't want you involved in something that's not your fault, Greg." When she glanced at him he was stunned by a vague impression of tears, though her eyes were dry. The suffusion lay beneath her skin.

He looked across at Wilson, no support there, the tablecloth stain now apparently the subject of a vast grant-assisted research project, and he took his cane off the arm of his chair and pushed the button set in the top of the smooth wood. A pill dropped into his palm from the Pez-style dispenser he had had custom-installed in the tip. Ailyn's idea, a joke really after seeing his hollow cane, and one she hadn't expected him to follow up on, but it had been good as a conversation-stopper for the past month. No one said a word as he slipped the pill into his mouth.

"We've got to leave," she finally said.

"Go on," Wilson told them. "I'll pay."

As they headed for the door - his comment "You mean we're not sneaking out through the kitchen?" making her face go even harder - he glanced toward the corner. The dark-haired man wasn't looking at them.

At his apartment it was boxing night. She retreated into her corner, only to come out at the sound of the bell. He got in the first punch. "Okay, what's so terrible about being seen with me, huh? Other than it makes you look short –"

"Greg –"

" – you should wear heels –"

"I ask you for this one thing, to accept that I need to keep it secret –"

"So take a paper bag next time and put it over my head!"

Round one which, he felt, went to him.

"It's not like that, Greg. And I haven't heard you inviting me up to the hospital."

"How about tomorrow? We'll do lunch." Well-blocked.

She stood, open. He could think of nothing else to throw at her. "I'm still a suspect," he surmised.

"Right. I'm just spying on you. Sure."

"It's possible."

She hadn't seen it coming. The sincerity in his voice was a right hook to the chin. "Do you – can you - think I would do that?"

"Chase did."

"You can actually believe everything I've done with you was – faked?" She looked ready to cry. A technical knock-out. He thought the referee ought to call it off now. No, he would tell her, I do not believe it. If he had to think that none of it was real then the ground he stood on would fall away.

"Look, Greg –" She was fighting herself now. "I didn't intend to get involved with you. Not like this. No one told me to, no one wanted me to. This whole thing." Her voice chilled him. "This – us. It wasn't meant to happen. It was a mistake. It should have stopped before it even got started."

If he ever had a heart attack he would know what it felt like, the clenching in his throat, blood-flow cut. It was a blow to the chest. You only pointed out mistakes if you were planning to rectify them. It wasn't meant to happen. Fate optional. She would tear herself from him now, her words as matter-of-fact as the beeping back-up signal on a truck. Getting out of here now, move out of my way. He could already feel the blank space in his mind where her body had been, the weight of her strength that had propped him yanked away so fast he would stumble and fall. Don't do this. Don't say you're leaving.

"But it did start," she said quietly. "And there's no stopping it now."

In the silence his phone rang. He didn't move to answer it. They waited, head-locked in their gaze, while his taped voice clicked on - "After the beep you may leave a message, which I will neither listen to nor answer" - and Wilson asked if everything was all right, paused for far too long and after a Wilsonesque throat-clearing hung up.

"We have to work this out," she finally said.

"No, what we have to do is just drop it." He found his cane and dispensed himself a pill. "Default situation. You keep looking over your shoulder - that spasmodic torticollis ought to keep us safe – while, if you'll excuse me, I'll just get back to wasting away in Vicodinville." He made a circus of swallowing the pill and stomped into the kitchen.

"You can't live with the secrecy, Greg, and I need it –"

Dirty glass; might have held anything but now it would be brandy. He poured three fingers. She stood in the door. "We have to find some compromise. We are going to talk."

"I said we're dropping it."

"You never drop anything."

He held the glass at arm's length didn't want it anyway and let it fall. It shattered gloriously. Her mouth fell open. Another trek back past her through the door. Childish always threw them, but the glee was fading fast. "Go home," he told her as he passed her. It was his last, thoroughly exhausted punch and he could barely raise his arm for it. "Go on home, Ailyn. They may be watching your place, noting when you get in." Please stay here. He stopped in the living room.

"I'm not spying on you."

"Oh, I know that. You're just keeping things from me. Even I know the difference."

"You're mad at me for being involved in things I can't tell you about, is that it?"

"I just thought we were going to tell each other everything." A mature request he felt he should get points for.

"I want to tell you everything, Greg. Even when I can't."

"Prove it." It seemed an echo. He was always needing proof, evidence, anything that might make sense of their crime scene.

"I love you."

That would do it. He felt abruptly heavy, leaning so hard on his cane there in the middle of the room that he thought it might break because he was huge now, filling up with some substance he couldn't name. As though he had never had mass before. Becoming real. There were tears in her eyes. He had hurt her with love. Made her weak, when he wanted to make her strong. The way she made him strong.

"I know you're not spying on me." Time for honesty. He spoke calmly. "I know all these secrets you keep are not about your job, Ailyn." Plunge in. "What I've figured for a while now is that you were turned, at some point, maybe by some Christian you were interrogating, or just by having to deal with it all the time, the ideas and practices. That at some point you decided they were right and that's when you became a Christian and started working as a double agent."

He watched her face turne to stone as he spoke, shock petrifying to numb fear as she leaned against the kitchen door for support. It told him he was right.

"It was little things at first that tipped me off," he went on. "The way you reacted, back last autumn, out in the parking lot at Kearney when I said you ought to visit Nealy and get to know him. You gave me this… scared look like maybe I'd hit on something I wasn't supposed to. Then when you were interrogating me you mentioned 'all the civil liberties we've lost'. Not 'what they've lost'. Only a sympathizer would word it like that." Her mouth was opening again, a mute cheer for his skills of observation. She hugged herself and a small sigh that might have been a sob came from her. "And then there was the black wig, behind all that distinctly unused ski equipment, in a box underneath old sweaters and a stack of newspapers at the very back of your closet."

"You went through my apartment." He had thought she couldn't speak.

"S.O.P." It seemed lame. "The point, Ailyn, is that it doesn't matter. What hurts is that you would think it would matter, that you couldn't trust me enough to tell me about it. Like you thought maybe I'd…report you, or hold you down with my cane and force Norxylam down your throat. You know I don't believe anymore that theism is an illness. You're free to believe whatever kooky life principle you want. And I could live with the secrecy, I would happily leave every restaurant in town with you if –" The honesty hurt his throat. "If you were in danger. I just need to know what it is I'm in. I need you to trust me enough to see that we're in it together. To let me in on it."

"The camps are divided." From her hollow voice he understood a metaphor, then realized she was stating a fact. "Men and women on opposite sides. If we were ever sent there, we wouldn't be together." A tear had trailed to her cheek and stopped. She held herself unnaturally still.

"Tell me how it started. It was Nealy, wasn't it? You interrogated him at some point, talked to him in prison." He seemed to remember Mike Nealy telling him he never had visitors. "He's a persuasive personality. Is that it, Ailyn? You met Nealy - somehow, somewhere - and he turned you?"

She hadn't moved. "He didn't need to." The stillness of the apartment swirled with her words. "He's my father."

****

End of Chapter 11