Chapter 3 What the Mirror Doesnt Say #3
It was a yes that arrived slightly too quickly, the way things do when the answer has been prepared.
She looked at him for a moment — the controlled line of his jaw, the deliberate neutrality of his expression — and recognised what she was seeing.
She had become, in seven months, fluent in the language of what Cassian Sterling was not saying.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm making coffee," he said. "I'm fine."
She let it go. Or she let the first round of it go, which was different — she set the subject down on the counter beside the honey pot to be returned to, and began putting things away.
The kitchen moved around them in its comfortable way: her opening the larder door, the sound of glass jars clicking together, the low hiss of the Moka pot building toward its finish.
She found a vase for the dahlias — the blue pottery one on the sill — and filled it at the tap and arranged the flowers without ceremony, the orange and rust of them improbably vivid against the dark stone of the window frame.
"How was the market?" he said, behind her.
"Good. I found the cheese Petra has decided is the only acceptable food." She turned. "I called my mother."
Something shifted, almost imperceptibly, in his expression. "How is she?"
"Very well. Business is good. She wanted to know when I'm going to use my degree."
She said it lightly, the way you repeat a joke you've heard before, a joke that still has a small edge on it. Cassian poured two coffees into the heavy white cups, the good ones, and she knew without looking that he was thinking about how to respond — she could feel the precision of him deciding.
"And what did you tell her?" he said, handing her the cup.
"I told her I was working on it." She wrapped her hands around the warmth of the cup. "Which is almost true."
"It could be entirely true, if you —"
"Cassian."
He stopped.
"I know," she said. "I know, and I appreciate it, and I'll figure it out. I just —" She looked at him. "I just need to figure it out myself, all right? I don't need you to solve it."
A beat. Something moved in his eyes — the brief, recognising flash of a man who had been doing exactly that in his head and had been caught. "All right," he said.
"Thank you."
They drank their coffee standing up at the island, the way they often did in the mornings, the two of them with the cups between their palms and the light coming in from the east-facing windows in long clean angles.
The dahlias on the sill made the room look like a painting.
The Bauernbrot was doing its final prove under the cloth in the corner.
Outside, a pair of wood pigeons were having an extended disagreement on the kitchen garden wall.
It was, Anya thought, almost aggressively a good morning.
The kind of morning her mother might have meant, actually — that this was the thing she was afraid of disappearing into.
Not because it was bad. Because it was so good she couldn't imagine wanting to leave it, even briefly, even to go back to the work of building something.
She wanted both. She wanted this and the building. She thought — she was fairly sure — both were possible. She wasn't entirely sure how to explain this to her mother, or to herself, without it sounding like the kind of thing people said when they hadn't quite committed to either.
She checked on the bread. It was ready, or close enough. She turned the oven on, and the range clicked and breathed, and the kitchen filled with its warming smell.
"Cassian," she said, her back to him, adjusting the dial.
"Mm."
"Is there something you need to tell me?"
A silence that lasted slightly too long.
She turned around. He was standing with his coffee cup in his right hand, and his left hand was at his wrist — his left hand was turning the crown of the watch between his thumb and forefinger, the small mechanical crown of the steel watch, the one he never removed, the one she had come to understand as a register of his private weather the way her mother read rain in the ache of her knee before a storm.
He only did that when he was afraid.
"No," he said. His voice was entirely level, which told her approximately nothing good.
She looked at him — at the control of him, the careful architecture of the word no — and she held her question in her mouth for a moment before setting it down.
"All right," she said.
She turned back to the oven.
The bread would take forty minutes. She would wait. She had always been, as her mother said, very patient. She had always been the one who could wait.
But she felt it: the small alteration in the morning's temperature, the way the air between them had changed while she was at the market, as though something had arrived in her absence and taken a seat at the table they hadn't set for it yet.
The watch crown turned again. She heard it — the faint click of the mechanism, once, twice.
She began scoring the loaf with the lame she kept on the wooden block, the shallow cuts releasing the tension in the dough, and she told herself it was nothing.
She did not entirely believe herself.