Chapter 5 #2
Saturday evenings we went to the Hayden Planetarium — her idea, offered once, tentatively, as if she expected me to refuse.
I didn’t. I had never been interested in astronomy but Kerra in that building was a different person than Kerra anywhere else; every guard she kept in place the rest of the week came down under that dome, and I would have sat through anything to see it.
And under that dome, in the dark, beside her, the part of me that never rested — the wolf my father had built to stay perpetually on watch — went quiet.
It happened nowhere else and with no one else. I did not let myself examine it.
She would tilt her head back at the projection and talk.
Not to me, exactly — to the room, to the darkness, to whatever it was in her that needed the expanse above her to feel like the right size.
She talked about deep time, about the distances between stars that made human lifetimes meaningless, about the way light leaving a dying star could still be traveling for a thousand years after the source was gone.
Her favorite theory was the multiverse. She explained it to me three times over three different Saturdays because I kept asking questions, not because I didn’t understand it but because I wanted to hear how she talked about it — the way her voice changed when she described a universe in which every choice branched into a new version of reality, every decision spawning an infinite number of selves, each living out the consequence of the road not taken.
“So somewhere,” I said, the third time, “there’s a version of me who made every wrong choice.”
“Every possible choice,” she corrected. “Right and wrong are your categories, not the multiverse’s.”
“What’s the multiverse’s category?”
“Consequence,” she said simply, and looked back up at the dome.
I thought about that for a long time. I still think about it.
If she was right — if every choice I had made or would make was already branching outward into some parallel version of this night, this city, this life — then somewhere, there was a version of me who had gone to my father in January and told him I couldn’t do it.
That I had met the girl, she was a person, and I wouldn’t use a person that way.
Somewhere that version of me existed, had faced whatever consequences came from it, and had lived with them.
I was not that version.
I knew what I had already given to my father’s network.
I knew what I was still holding back — the thing she had shown me that mattered most, the detail that would unlock everything he needed.
I had been holding it back for months, telling myself I was waiting for the right moment, the right method of delivery, knowing the whole time that I was lying.
I was holding it back because once I gave it up, there was no version of this that ended well for her.
She leaned her head against my shoulder in the dark under the dome and said, very quietly, “I’m glad you found me, Z.”
I put my arm around her and said nothing.
I did not deserve to say anything.
She came to my apartment for the first time in April.
Her father was strict about where she went and who she spent time with — she had told me on our third session that Alpha Conti ran his household the way he ran his pack, which meant everyone accounted for and no exceptions, the rule and the wolf the same thing.
She had been navigating around it for months, small careful lies that she hated telling, because Kerra was not a person built for deception. She was too direct. Too honest.
I thought about that, too. Later.
We were on the couch. It was evening, the city was going dark outside, and she was talking about something, leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands moving, the way she always did when she was animated.
I was watching her and not listening to the words, just watching, and she caught me doing it and stopped mid-sentence.
“You’re not listening.”
“I am,” I said. “Just not to what you’re saying.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “What are you doing to me, Zimife?”
Her voice was quiet, serious, and entirely without performance, which was what undid me every time — that she never performed anything. She said what she meant, always, and what she meant was always more than I deserved.
I leaned forward, pushed her hair back from her face, and held it there, and her scent moved through me, and my wolf pressed toward her, that same wordless pull I had been refusing to name since a corridor in January, and she looked at me with those eyes that had been moss-green all evening, and were going darker now the way they did when she felt something she wasn’t sure how to handle.
“I don’t know,” I said. Which was true. Which was the first entirely true thing I had said to her since January.
I kissed her once — soft, careful — felt her exhale against my mouth and pull back just slightly, her forehead against mine, both of us very still.
Her phone rang.
She closed her eyes for a second. Then, she answered it. Her grandfather, his voice audible even from where I sat, asking where she was and when she’d be home. She told him she was studying. She told him an hour. She ended the call and sat with it in her hand looking at the middle distance.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
She stood, gathered her bag, and paused at the door, one hand on the frame, and looked back at me with the full weight of that open face.
“I’ve never lied to my grandfather before,” she said. “Not once. In nineteen years.”
She wasn’t accusing me. She was just telling me.
That was the thing about Kerra — she always told you exactly what something cost her, not to make you feel guilty, just because she believed in naming things honestly.
She believed that naming something was the first step to deciding how to live with it.
“Kerra—“
But she was already gone. The door clicked shut behind her and I sat in the empty apartment with the city going dark outside the window, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, exactly what I was.
I had spent four months getting Kerra Conti to trust me.
I had succeeded.
And the thing I had been lying to myself about — the thing I had been unable to say even inside my own head — was that it had stopped being the job somewhere in the first month, and I had kept doing it anyway. Not for my father. Not for the network. Not for any reason I could defend.
I had kept doing it because I wanted her close.
I had told myself that wanting her close was the same as protecting her, and it wasn’t.
It was never that. My wolf had decided something about her — had named it the instant her scent reached me, the way our kind is built to — and I had spent every day since refusing to hear what it was saying, because I already knew, and knowing it would have made the work impossible.
The information I hadn’t given my father yet sat in my chest like a coal.
I knew what he would do when I gave it to him. I had always known.
I sat there until the city was fully dark, and I did not call him.
I told myself that meant something.
It didn’t.