Lena's POV
We walked for a long time before I answered him.
Not because I was avoiding it, Henry had asked directly and Henry had earned the direct answer and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise. But because I was trying to find the true version of the answer rather than the clean one, and the true version kept being more complicated than I wanted it to be. It kept having edges that the clean version didn't have. It kept requiring me to account for things I would have preferred not to account for on a Tuesday afternoon on a quiet street in the city.
Henry didn't push.
He walked beside me and let the city move around us and waited with the particular patience that was specific to him, not passive, not the patience of someone who had stopped paying attention, but the genuine patience of
