"I should go," I said.
"I'll drive you," he said.
"You don't need—"
"Nova." He said my name in the register that had no performance in it. "It's ten o'clock and you walked here and it's dark and I am going to drive you home."
I looked at him.
"You are extremely difficult," I said.
"So I've been told," he said, and started the car.
He drove without talking, which I had not expected. I had expected the careful, precise conversation of the annex office or the professional deployment of the corporate register. What I got was someone who drove the way he thought — directly, economically, without unnecessary movement — and let the silence be what it was.
It was, I was discovering, a surprisingly comfortable silence.
The kind that didn't require filling.
We were two blocks from my mothe
