Chapter 58
Saint
The tracker conversation happens on a Wednesday.
We are in the kitchen, her at the table with her coffee, me at the counter with mine and briefing documents, which have become thicker since the council meeting and show no signs of thinning.
She sets down her coffee and looks at me. “The tracker,” she says.
I set down my documents.
“My student ID,” she says. “You had Zero embed a tracker without telling me.”
“Yes.”
“When did you remove it?” she asks.
“I haven’t,” I say, truthfully. “It’s for your safety.”
She will always be a target. Her safety is my priority. She doesn’t understand the magnitude of who she is with, but she will in due time.
“Because that morning, you left knowing that I was in your dorm room with you, and you chose to trust that anyway. Tracking someone who chooses to trust you is not about control or about caging you. It is exactly the thing I told myself I was not doing.”
She holds my gaze. “You should have told me.”
“Yes.”
“Before you put it there,” she says. “Not just why.”
“You’re right,” I say, “to both.”
“If Victor wasn’t a threat, would you have told me then?”
I think about this honestly.
“Eventually. When I was sure you could have the information without it changing how safe you were willing to let yourself feel.”
“That is still not the same as telling me first,” she points out.
“No,” I agree. “It is not.”
She picks up her coffee, takes a drink, then sets it down.
“Okay,” she says. “Not because what you did was right. It wasn’t.
But because I know why you did it, and the difference between your version and Roman’s is not the same.
And I know that you are sitting here right now not defending it, which is what honesty looks like in practice as opposed to in principle. ”
She reaches across the table and taps the top of my hand once. Brief. “Don’t do it again.”
“I won’t,” I say. And I mean it.
She goes back to her readings. I go back to my documents.
The kitchen is ordinary around us. I find that it does not feel like the white room at all.
It feels like something else.
It feels like being known.
By her.