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“Valene already knows and has been mercifully silent, which means she’s saving it for the right moment.”
“Probably.”
“If it ends up in Bexley’s notebook—”
“It won’t.”
She glanced at him. He was watching the water, hands in the pockets of the jacket — the one with the clean burn mark on the left cuff, which she still had opinions about.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not going to tell Pike, and Pike is the only person who tells Bexley before she finds things herself.”
She almost laughed. Not quite — it caught in her throat and came out as a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. He glanced at her, briefly, then looked away again before she could decide what to make of it.
They kept walking. The boardwalk thinned ahead of them, the last few stalls dark and shuttered for the night. The ocean was louder. She could feel the mist off it, that cold that only came off dark water.
She stopped at a lamppost. “What else do you do? Besides the radios.”
“Woodworking.”
A man who fixed old electronics and built furniture in his spare time, who ran a town, held a ward line against an active supernatural threat, and still found time to make things with his hands. “What have you made?”
“The kitchen table. The bookshelves in the hall. A bench outside the back door that I should have put somewhere else, but it’s set in concrete now.”
“Why the wrong place?”
“Faces west. Gets the afternoon sun.”
She waited.
He turned back to the water. “I work nights. Afternoons are when I sleep.”
She stopped walking.
He took two more steps, then realized and turned back, waiting to see if this required a response.
“You built a bench,” she said, “in the wrong place, cemented in, and you live with that.”
“It’s a good bench.”
“In the wrong place.”
“Still a good bench.”
She started walking again because standing still was making her face do things. “I respect that more than I expected to.”
“It’s a bench.”
“It’s a commitment to imperfection. I find that unexpectedly reassuring in a man who appears to manage everything perfectly.”
He considered that. “There’s also a shelf in the library that leans three degrees to the left.”
She did laugh. A real one. He looked faintly alarmed, which only made it worse.
“What do you watch? When you’re not baking.”
She considered lying. It lasted approximately one second. “Crime documentaries.”
