“Do you think she’ll stay?” she asked.
I thought about the terrace. The green tea held in both hands. The way she’d turned back to the training yard after Damon’s welcome and kept watching, as though what mattered wasn’t the warning itself but what the warning told her about the territory she was navigating.
Filing it. Cataloguing it.
Learning how to be here.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that she’s still deciding whether she trusts what’s happening.”
“Whether she trusts him,” Petra corrected, softly.
“Whether she trusts herself.” I picked up the clipboard. “Those are two different problems and they require two different solutions. She can’t work one out while she’s still sitting with the other.”
Petra absorbed that the way she absorbed most things; quietly, thoroughly, without need
