Lena's POV
I asked him about the packs he had destroyed three days later.
I had not planned to ask it that evening specifically. We were in the reading room, the fire doing its low warm work against the stone walls, and I had been turning the question over for weeks, weighing the cost of asking against the cost of continuing to wonder. The wondering had begun to feel like its own kind of dishonesty, a hole in the architecture of what I was trying to build between us.
"Tell me about the packs," I said.
He looked up from the report he had been reading. He did not ask which packs. He knew exactly what I meant.
He set the report down. He was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of a man deciding how much of himself to hand over and then deciding, apparently, all of it.
"There were th
