"The arrangement was always conditional on mutual adult consent," Holt said. "That has never changed."
"And yet you've never stopped expecting it."
"I've never stopped expecting you to consider it seriously," Holt said. "Which is not the same thing. There's a difference between expectation and hope."
The kitchen was quiet.
I thought about the letter from my mother, still folded in my jacket. *I hope, wherever you are, someone is seeing you the way we should have.* I thought about the specific texture of hope that had been shaped into something that looked too much like a directive to feel clean.
"The alliance," I said. "What happens to it if Ryke refuses the match? Concretely."
Holt looked at me. He was going to redirect, I could see him preparing to — and then he changed his mind, v
