Fourteen: Bell

The band stopped between one tune and the next, and for about the length of a breath the Dance Hall heard itself. A hundred and ten people. Mildred at the garden doors with the last of the lunch plates stacked up her forearm, and then the doors closing behind her, and the middle of the floor lying bare from the windows to the far wall.

Nobody had cleared it. It had simply stopped being a place where tables went.

The music came from nowhere in particular. One low note, held under the dome as if the room had cleared its throat, then a slow line climbing out of it that none of the players had been handed. The Mildred cellist looked down at her bow, which had not moved. She set it to the string anyway. The fiddles came in behind her.

Andy was at the edge of the floor with a glass he had forgotten he was holding. The light through the long windows had been running ahead of the clock all afternoon, and he had stopped pretending not to notice somewhere around the second course. He went down the bond instead, the way a man pats a pocket for keys he knows are there. Laura was eleven yards off at the family tables, between Emi and his father, laughing at something his father had said. She was frightened—the laugh was real and so was the other thing, and the bond didn’t care what her face was doing.

“Put that down,” Myra said, at his elbow. “It’s gone the same color you have.”

He looked at the glass. “What color have I gone?”

“Somebody doing sums.” Her hand found his, took the glass out of his fingers, and set it on the nearest table. She had. “Come on. I want the floor before anybody else gets it.”

He took her out. The first few steps were his and then they were hers, because Myra had a better ear than he did and had never cared what her own feet were up to. The more people there were around her, the sharper the room came up for her, and there had never been this many. They stood three deep at the edges of the floor, every one of them putting out something she could steer by. Both tails carried themselves clear behind her.

She put her free hand flat on his chest, over the clasp, and left it.

“You were at my parents’ table,” Andy said. “I saw you from across the room.”

“I was,” Myra said.

“Mom fed you.”

“Twice. There was a plate made out of two other plates.” Myra’s mouth moved. “I told them, Andy.”

He nearly missed a step. She put him back on it without seeming to notice she’d done it.

“Told them.” It came out flat.

“What I said to her. When we were thirteen.” Her voice had dropped—not to a whisper, but to the level people use once they have decided a thing is for one person. “The story I made up, and why she was out on the footbridge in the rain. Riley had already given them her half. I gave them mine.”

Andy found he had nothing ready, and let the music carry the space where something should have gone.

“You didn’t have to do that on your own,” Andy said, eventually.

“I did, though.” She said it plainly, the way she said things now that she had stopped taking them back. “If you’d been sitting there, I’d have been telling it to you, with them listening in. It had to be to them. Your mother had put a chair out for me. I couldn’t sit in it without her knowing what she was putting it out for.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was never hers to forgive,” Myra said. “That it was Laura’s, and yours, and you both already did.” Her ears came up off her hair, slightly, and went back down, as if they had been caught at something. “And then she forgave me anyway, because she doesn’t hold with half measures. And I’m to be at hers for Christmas. She told me which chair.”

Andy laughed, and it came out rougher than he’d meant. “She does that. She does the chair.”

“I didn’t ask which. She’d already decided.” Myra turned her face up toward him. “Nobody has ever put me somewhere before I asked to be put there.”

“Myra.”

“Thank you,” Myra murmured.

“For what?” Andy asked.

“You knew all of it. You married me knowing, and you never once made me say it again to get back in.” Her hand pressed flatter on his chest. “So. Thank you. Don’t make a face about it.”

They went down the long side of the floor. At the family tables his mother had the camera up and wasn’t taking anything with it, and his father had a hand on the back of her chair. Neither of them looked away from Myra once.

At the turn Myra went quiet for a whole phrase. He felt her attention leave him, go out across the floor, and come back.

“You’re the loudest worried thing in this building,” she said.

“I know,” Andy said.

“The second loudest is waiting for her turn.” Myra didn’t say the name. Her tails had gone still behind her. “She’s very good at it. She’s laughing, and everybody over there thinks she’s laughing.”

“I know,” he said again.

“I thought you might.” Myra let a breath go. “Then when it’s her song, dance with my sister properly. Not like you’re taking her pulse.”

He didn’t ask how long she had known. The song had perhaps a minute left in it, and he wanted her to have the whole of the minute. Her fingers found the edge of the mantle at his shoulder and followed it down, the lining under her thumb.

“Somebody told me it came out the right green,” Myra said.

“It came out exactly your green,” he said.

“I’ll take your word for it. I only ever get it the color you are.” She smoothed it once, flat, as though it had creased. “Today it’s been all sorts.”

The cello let its last note go long and low, and somewhere under it a second tune was already starting, lighter, with a lift the first one hadn’t had. Myra stepped back on the beat. She kept his hand one note longer than the music asked, then turned him by it—neatly, like handing over a coat—toward the woman already crossing the floor with her hair swinging.

Emily arrived talking, which was how he knew she had been nervous about it.

“Can I tell you something stupid?” She took his hands, one and then the other, and put them where she wanted them, which was not quite where he would have put them. The gold-and-pink fall of her hair swung out as she turned and came back to lie where it always lay, over everything it had decided to cover. Her shoes were the only thing on her, and she had chosen them with more care than most people choose a car. “I practiced. With Dawn. In the Tavern, at seven in the morning.”

“Why the Tavern?” Andy asked.

“It’s one of the few places nobody walks through.” She stepped, and waited to see if he would follow, and he did. “Dawn kept saying ‘count’ and I kept saying ‘I am counting,’ and I wasn’t. Look, though. Look at me not counting now.”

The new tune had a sway in it, three to the bar, and the band had caught up with it by the second phrase and seemed happier for the company. Emily took it as she took most things she loved: all at once, then carefully, in case somebody asked for it back. Her hand came up off his shoulder once to touch the clasp at his throat, the two gold hands she had fastened there on the mound, and went back down.

“It sits right,” Emily said. “I was worried it would pull.”

“It doesn’t pull.” He touched it to check, and it didn’t.

“You’d say that if it did.” She tipped her head at him. “You would. You’d wear a thing that was choking you all afternoon so nobody felt bad.”

“It isn’t choking me.”

“Good,” Emily said. “It’s not allowed to.”

Along the edge of the floor, the room eased wherever she went past it. It had been doing that all day and he had stopped being surprised by it and hadn’t stopped liking it. Luis Moreno, who had kept his arms folded since the water like a pose he’d been issued, let them come down. Jonathan Ramsey lifted his hands off his knees. At the family tables Kathleen Allen had her teacher’s face on, the one that stayed level so everything underneath could get on with being loud, and it was losing.

Andy felt it get into him as well, the way warmth gets into a cold room without anybody seeing it come in. His shoulders came down a quarter of an inch. He hadn’t noticed they were up.

“Tell me what you’re going to paint first,” Andy said. “After all this.”

Emily went a little pink from the collarbones up.

“So bossy,” she said, and was delighted, and did as she was told. “This. Here. But not from here—from up there.” She lifted her chin a little at the place where the dome came down to meet the wall. “Where the very tall lady is sitting and pretending she’s part of the building. Don’t look, she’s trying so hard. From her corner you’d get the whole floor. The seven of us in a line coming out of the tables, and you in the middle getting handed round like a dish.”

“That’s how you see me?” Andy said, arching an eyebrow.

“That’s how everybody saw you. It’s very flattering. You’re an excellent dish.” She considered it, her eyes going somewhere past his shoulder where the painting evidently already was. “Big. Bigger than anything I’ve done. I’d need a wall. I’d need a room with a window on the north side, because the light doesn’t move around on you that way, and I’d need about a month where nobody asks me to be anywhere.”

“You can have the month.” He meant it, and she could hear that he did.

“I know I can. I’m telling you so it’s on the record.” She squeezed his hand. “That’s my want for today. I said I’d keep saying them out loud.”

“You did.”

“So.” The word came with a small pivot in her step, part of the dance. “Your turn. One thing you want. After. And it has to be small. If you say ‘world peace’ I’m leaving you here.”

He thought about it longer than she expected him to. She waited, which from Emily was a present all by itself.

“A Sunday,” he said.

“A Sunday,” Emily said.

“Nothing on it. Nobody getting married. Nobody’s parents coming in on a train. I get up first and make the coffee, and you all come down in the wrong order and complain about it.” He shrugged, and it moved her with it. “That’s it.”

He wasn’t sure why he’d reached for that one. Maybe because nothing in it needed him to win anything first. Emily let a whole phrase of the music go by in silence. Then she laughed—not the bright social laugh she had been handing out to relatives since noon, but a lower one that went back into her rather than out.

“That’s not small,” Emily said.

“It’s pretty small,” he protested.

“It’s the whole house.” She put her forehead against his collarbone for a step, right beside the clasp, and took it away again. “Okay. I’ll paint you a Sunday. After the wall. Nobody in it doing anything. You’ll hate it and hang it in the kitchen.”

“I won’t hate it.”

“You’ll hang it in the kitchen,” she said again. That seemed to settle it, and he supposed it did.

He turned her under his arm and she went out to the end of it, hair lifting, and came back in against him laughing. Her father had stood up at the Allen table. David stood stooped a little, hands in his pockets, not clapping, only watching his daughter go round the floor as if he were memorizing the distance.

“He’s going to cry,” Emily said, without looking.

“He’s not going to cry,” Andy said.

“He’s been working up to it since the soup.” She said it with enormous fondness.

It was the kind of song that ended before anybody was done with it. The sway went out of it bar by bar, and under the last of it something quicker was already knocking to be let in, a tune that seemed to want everybody’s feet off the ground. Emily heard it too. Her face went complicated and fond, as if she already knew who it was for.

“Oh, she’s going to be adorable,” she said, and stepped back, and gave him a small shove in the chest with the flat of one hand, the way you launch a boat. She headed to her father, who was struggling not to cry.

Dawn was already moving when she reached him, up on the balls of her feet with both ears straight up and the whole of her keeping time to a tune that had barely finished arriving. It was a quick one; the fiddles had taken it at a run.

“Mr. Cooper,” Dawn said.

“Ms. Moreno,” Andy said.

“Your sash is crooked.” She fixed it before he could look: two tugs at his waist, a flat hand to settle the knot. She had wound it there on the mound the same way, like an apron on somebody about to be sent out to a dining room. “There. Now you can be seen with me.”

She danced as she did everything with her legs, with a good deal more in reserve than the moment asked for, and he had to work to keep up. Her tail went like a metronome somebody had wound too tight.

Two circuits in, her ears went back a quarter turn and stayed there.

“Okay,” Dawn said. “I have to tell you something, and you’re not allowed to be nice about it.”

“I’ll try.” He did his best to look like a man who would try.

“My head’s been going off about you since the plates went.” She said it to his collarbone, briskly, the way she would have reported a leak to maintenance. “Not a big one. Just the thing where I know you need something. It isn’t a pull anymore, it’s just—a kettle, in another room. It clicks on and it sits there and it doesn’t stop.”

He hadn’t known it was that loud on him. He had thought, for most of the afternoon, that he was hiding it rather well. Maybe he had been, from everybody who wasn’t wired straight into him.

“And this morning,” Dawn said, “on the mound, in front of my dad and your dad and a hundred people, I promised to let you look after me. For once. I practiced that vow in the bath.” Her ears came down another notch. “So I’ve got a kettle going, and I’ve got a promise, and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to be listening to. I’ve had two whole songs to work it out and I can’t. Just tell me.”

“Both,” Andy said.

“That’s a cop-out,” Dawn said.

“It’s the answer.” He turned her, and she let him, which from Dawn at that tempo was a concession. “You’re dancing with me. I’m leading. That’s the promise, that’s you letting me. And whatever the kettle wants, you’re already doing it. You’ve been doing it since you walked over.”

She looked up at him with narrowed eyes, as though checking a bill for a charge she hadn’t ordered.

“That’s cheating,” she said.

“It’s in the vows,” Andy said.

Dawn laughed—a short, startled, helpless sound, because it was her own line and she knew it. Her ears came all the way back up.

The Moreno table was two rows back from the edge of the floor. Luis had his arms down now. Sebastian was eating a bread roll with great speed while trying to look as if he weren’t. Their father sat between them with a coffee cup he had not drunk from, both hands round it. He watched his daughter the way a man might watch a house he used to live in and had been told he could visit again.

“Have you said anything to him?” Andy asked. “Since the line?”

Dawn didn’t look over. “Not in words,” Dawn said.

“You will.”

“After the cake.” She had it planned like she planned a checkout rush. “When he’s got a plate in his hands and something to do with them. He can’t cry at you if he’s holding a plate.”

“You’re going to make him hold a plate.” Andy could see it already.

“I’m going to hand him one. He’ll hold it.” Her mouth pulled sideways. “He always holds what you hand him. That was never the problem.”

The tune climbed. A bar opened up in it that plainly wanted somebody to leave the floor. Dawn heard it before he did. Her weight dropped, her hands came to his shoulders, and her whole face asked him. He took her by the waist and she went up.

She went up far more than a person should, and didn’t apologize for an inch of it. At the top, with her hands braced on his shoulders and her ears nearly brushing the orbs, his eyes went past her and up the curve of the wall to the moulding.

The goddess on the cornice had been asked once, nicely, to keep still. Nine feet of her sat on the gilded ledge where the dome came down to the wall, her back to the curve of it and her legs hanging down into the room, lilac and naked, her pale hair falling well past her knees.

She wasn’t still now—not all at once, but a joint at a time. One bare heel had begun to mark the beat against the stone—softly, then not softly. Her fingers had come up off her knee and were tracing a figure in the air that went round on itself and came back. Her shoulders were going with the tune. Then the whole long frame of her was keeping time, sitting down, as if her body had simply stopped consulting her about it. She had the face of somebody at a wedding who had promised the bride she wouldn’t cry, and was crying, and had decided she didn’t care.

On the floor below her, beside the near wall, Skye had seen it. She lifted her cup to the moulding in both hands and held it up there, and her face had the kind of happiness on it that didn’t bother being polite.

Nobody else looked up. Every eye in the hall was on the floor, where it had been told to be. Dawn came down light on both feet, laughing, ears flung straight back. “What were you looking at?” Dawn asked.

“The ceiling’s dancing,” Andy said.

“Of course it is.” Then, quieter, so that it went only as far as his collar: “Thank you, Andy Cooper. For the mound. When you said you’d seen it—all of it, all season. I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t get my face to do it.”

“You didn’t have to.” It came out lower than he meant it to.

“I know I didn’t. I’m saying it now so it’s said.” She let it stand, and didn’t joke it away. Then her ears twitched. “Now let go before I cry on your sash. I tied that.”

The quick tune ran itself out in a flurry, and the next one came in steadier. At the edge of the dancing Erin stood with her hands clasped behind her back, watching the floor the way she watched a problem somebody had set her. She made no move toward him. She was going to let him cross.

He crossed to her. She unclasped her hands and held one out, and when he took it she tapped the cuff on his wrist twice with a fingernail, sun-gold against the green of her.

“Fourth,” Erin said.

“You counted,” Andy said.

“I always count.” She let him bring her in. “You’ve been on this floor seventeen minutes and you’ve stepped on nobody. I’m impressed and a little suspicious.”

The tune was a steady one. It had a floor under it, as though somebody had built it to be walked on, and the band had settled into it with visible relief after Dawn’s. Erin danced to it the way a person reads a map: correctly, and without much interest in anything but getting where the route went. But she pressed herself against him, her green breasts against his chest, the scent of basil and mint and growing things surrounding her. She was radiant.

Her father was at the Delgado table with his hands flat on the cloth. Her mother was two tables down from him, at the exact distance they had agreed on without ever saying so. Steve sat between the two tables, belonging to neither, with his chair turned round to face the floor.

“He said something to you,” Erin said. “In the line. I saw his hand come down from his face.”

“He did.”

“What?”

“That you don’t let people in.” Andy turned her, carefully, around the twins. “And that I must have done something right.”

Erin snorted, short and sharp.

“He’s not wrong.” She looked away toward the table and back again, fast, as if checking a gauge. “You did several things right. Don’t let it go to your head. You did about as many wrong first.”

“I know,” Andy said.

“I know you know. I was there.” Her mouth moved, barely. “He’s never said that many words in a row to anybody who wasn’t a contractor.”

“About Sam’s toast,” Erin said, after a moment. He didn’t say anything. “‘If anybody’s keeping score at the end of it.’” She said it flat, word for word, the way she would have read back a line of somebody else’s report. “The room thought that was about friendship. It wasn’t about friendship, was it? She said it to you, and the room happened to be standing there.”

“No.” He turned her away from the band. “It wasn’t.”

“I thought not.” Her grip changed on his shoulder—not tighter, but surer, as if she had put a foot on a step she had been looking for. “Sam and I share a crown and a spreadsheet. If she’s taken a job, I’d like to see the job description.”

He brought her in closer. Close enough that the fiddles had to come round the pair of them to get anywhere, and close enough that what he said next would go no further than her ear.

“This morning, on the mound,” he said, under his breath, “I asked Sam to carry the harem bond. If something separates us.”

Erin kept dancing. Her feet didn’t so much as hesitate.

“It runs through me,” Andy said. “All of it, to every one of you. If I’m too far—somebody has to be holding the other end, or it comes apart. Laura holds it already. That came with Consort, and it’s been hers the whole time. Sam holds it by grant. So will you. I am giving it to you, for as long as I can.”

“Define too far,” Erin said.

“I can’t,” Andy said. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what it looks like, and I don’t know which side of it anybody’s going to be standing on.”

“So four.” She had it at once. “Three of us, in three places, plus you, and whichever way it breaks hopefully there’s one on each side of the break.”

“Yes.”

She took that in for two bars of the tune. He watched her do it, the way she would have walked a boundary line before she drew it on anything. “Duration,” Erin said.

“A week.” He felt her count it. “It’s the longest permission I can grant. You have it. As of now.”

“And after the week?”

“Everything is over, and I hope we’re all together,” Andy said.

He had gone down the bond when he said Laura’s name, because he couldn’t say it in that sentence without going to look. She was where she had been, at the edge of the floor with Emi, and the other reading hadn’t moved either. It was high. It had been high since the water. He didn’t know which he dreaded more—the reading staying where it was, or finding out what it would take to move it.

Erin was watching his face. Whatever she saw there she filed and didn’t ask about. “Deal,” she said.

It came out steady, the kind of steady that had been built on purpose, but she was not made of anything that could hear that and have it cost nothing. “I love you, Erin,” he told her. His hand was flat between her shoulder blades, and under it he felt the cost arrive, a small hard knot of it coming up through her, and then felt it go, loosening, the way it always did for her under his hands. Her nipples pebbled. She let out a breath she had probably been holding since the toast.

“Unfair,” Erin said, without heat.

“I can’t help it,” Andy said.

“I know you can’t. Still unfair.” She put her forehead against his shoulder for a moment and took it away again, and her voice when it came back was entirely her ordinary one. She tipped her head back and looked at him properly, all the way. “I love you too. Don’t get cut off, Andy.”

“I’m not planning to.” His hand stayed where it was on her back.

“That wasn’t a request for your plans.” She stepped back as the tune came down to its last bars, and gave his wrist and the cuff on it one more short squeeze. “Go on. Catgirl’s next, and her tail’s been going for a whole song.”

Claire was there before he had finished turning round. She had crossed the floor the way she crossed every floor, without a sound, and she took his hand as if picking up a book she had put down a minute ago and meant to finish.

The next tune was almost nothing. One fiddle, played soft, and the rest of the band laying their bows across their knees to let it through. A hush came down over the hall with it, the way it does in a room when somebody starts to sing without warning and everybody decides at once not to be the one who coughs.

It suited her. Her ears were forward and her tail was up behind her in a slow question mark, and for the first half of the tune she didn’t take her eyes off his face.

He could feel her. He always could, underneath everything. Whatever had come off him on the long side with Erin had gone into her at the same moment, down the bond, as it always did; she had been standing at the edge of the floor with it for a whole song. What came back up the bond at him now was not a question but an answer, flat and settled and unbothered, the same thing he had felt from her on the mound when she fastened the locket at his throat, and it went into him like cool water on a burn.

She didn’t ask. Claire had never needed to ask him what he was feeling. She only ever wanted to know what he was going to do about it, and she could see he didn’t know yet.

His free hand went to the locket without his meaning it to. She saw it go, and put her own over it, and pressed the little shut thing flat against his chest. Then she let go.

Halfway through the tune she stopped dancing.

She simply stood still in the middle of the floor, with the fiddle going on and the whole hall watching, and took the notebook out and began to write. Andy stood and waited. There wasn’t anything else to do. Around the edge of the floor the hall seemed to decide this was part of the dance, and let it be.

It took her perhaps twenty seconds. Then she turned the page round and held it up for him.

For the record. 4:57, the Dance Hall. Fifth. He stepped on me once, in the second bar, and I am not filing a complaint. My mother is watching me dance with somebody in front of a hundred and ten people, and her hands are not doing anything.

He looked over her head at the Freeman table. Annabelle Freeman sat upright with her hands in her lap, perfectly still, the ring on the right one catching the orb-light and staying there. He had never once seen those hands at rest. Claire had noticed it before he had.

“You’re keeping it,” Andy said. “The record.”

She nodded, once, short. I said I would.

“Can I read it?” he asked.

When it’s a book. The pencil moved again. It will be very long. You are in most of it. You will want to argue with some of it and you will not be permitted to.

“That seems fair,” Andy said.

It is not fair. But it is accurate.

“And Adrien?” Andy asked. “You were with him an hour.”

I have two hundred and twelve questions for Adrien. He has agreed to answer thirty. Her ears went back, smug. He could sense she was pleased with herself. He chose the thirty he thinks are easy. He is wrong about seventeen of them.

He laughed, and felt her like it through the bond, a small bright click. She put the notebook away, took his hand back, and started dancing again where she had left off, the right foot on the right beat, as though somebody had paused a recording.

On the floor, the fiddle drew out its last long note and let it go. Claire stepped back. She looked up at him for one more second, the way she looked at a page before turning it. On her tiptoes, she stole a kiss from him. Then she turned him herself, a hand flat on his chest, toward the woman already reaching for him with more hands than anyone.

Emi arrived the way she always arrived when she was glad. She had both his hands before the tune had finished coming in, and a third hand at the back of his neck, and a fourth already up at his head pushing the circlet level with a small, decided shove. The two she had left over hovered for a moment, undecided, then came to rest on his lapels as though they had meant to all along.

“Level,” Emi said. “I didn’t spend four minutes on that for you to dance it crooked.”

“It was crooked?” He resisted the urge to reach up and check.

“It was thinking about it.”

The band had come back for her—all of them, bows up—and the hall gave them a warm, rolling tune with something in it like bells a long way off. Emi’s head came a little higher on him than it used to. He had noticed it at the water, and again now, her chin nearly at his collarbone where it had once sat at his chest. She had grown since Paris. Nobody had explained it to either of them, and she didn’t seem to mind. She was almost as tall as Sam or Marissa, now.

“Summer is talking to Sam’s brother,” Emi said, looking past him.

He turned his head. By the pillar near the cake table, Michael Collins was standing a careful yard from a white-haired woman who was smiling at him.

“Is that allowed?” Andy asked.

“She used to send me drawings, when she was small. Everything is allowed.” Emi had the kind of smile on that suggested the universe had, for once, done exactly as it was told. Then she looked back at Andy, and her face settled, the way it did before she said a true thing on purpose. “I told your mother something. At the table. Before Myra came.”

“What did you tell her?” he asked.

“That we’re having a baby before the year’s out.” Four of her hands kept dancing. The two on his lapels had gone still. “I’m not sure where that came from. She asked how I was, really, and I told her I was happy and still waiting for someone to take it back, and then I told her that, too, because it was true, and it seemed rude to tell her one without the other.”

He laughed. “You told my mother.”

“Your mother asked.”

“Let me guess,” Andy said, “you’ve already named her. Anaïs.”

Emi stopped—not in the dance, but in herself. Her feet went on and her hands went on, and something behind her eyes went quiet all at once. She looked up at him as if he had reached into her pocket and taken out a thing she had not shown anybody.

“How do you know that name?” Emi said.

“You—” He had meant it as a joke. He could feel it stop being one. “Emi. Where did you get it from?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I told your mother. I don’t know where I got it. It was just there one morning and it was already hers.” Her voice had gone quiet and exact. “Andy. How do you know it?”

So he told her. Laura’s last Dream Date, the one she had tuned to him instead of to herself. A house that was too big and too loud, and breakfast coming apart at every seam, and Emi in the middle of it running the whole kitchen with five hands and holding a baby on her hip with the sixth.

“Anaïs,” Andy said. “That was her name. Everybody said it like they’d been saying it for a year.”

“What was she like?” The question came fast. “Tell me what she was like.”

“Small. Loud. She had your hair.” He found he could see it, which surprised him. “She had six arms, Emi. Like her mom. She was grabbing everything on the table at once, and Sumiku was sitting next to her peeling fruit as fast as she could and still losing.”

The air around them turned.

It came up against his face as if a door had opened somewhere onto a summer garden, and it smelled of cut stems and wet earth, which nothing in that hall had any business smelling of. It did that when Emi loved something past the point of keeping it in. Two tables back, Julien Connard lifted his head like a man who had caught the smell of rain. Emi didn’t notice. Her eyes had filled and she was smiling through it, all the way, and three of her hands had come up and taken hold of his lapel, the collar, the edge of the mantle, as if she needed something to hold onto while she heard it.

“Six,” Emi whispered.

“Six.”

“She had to have six.” She laughed, wetly. “I’d have been so offended otherwise.”

He looked at her. He looked at the hands on his collar, and the two that had come off his lapels to hold each other, and he thought about the name arriving one morning with nobody to have given it to her.

“Emi,” he said, carefully. “Are you—”

She put one finger on his mouth. Just one, out of six.

“Not on a dance floor,” Emi said. “That part of the story gets told properly. In a quiet room, with nobody’s parents in it.” The finger came away. “You can ask me again then. I might have a different answer. I might have the same one.”

“That’s not an answer.” He could hear himself smiling.

“No,” she agreed, serenely. “It’s a chapter break.”

Over her shoulder, at the far end of the hall, one person in the building was not watching the floor.

Sumiku stood at the long windows with her back to all of it, wings folded close, her upper hands loose at her sides and the lower pair folded, nothing in any of them. Above the dancers the dome showed its deep blue painted dusk, soft and even and entirely false. The windows showed the real sky, and it had gone dark over the trees well ahead of the hour. Sumiku was watching that one. She had been, Andy thought, for longer than she knew. She had asked him once for time alone together after tomorrow.

He knew what she was watching for. He wasn’t sure she did.

“You’re somewhere else,” Emi said, not unkindly.

“I’m here.” He drew her a little closer, to prove it.

“Half of you is. The other half is over by the windows with her.” She didn’t make anything of it. “It’s all right. I like the half I’ve got.” She let go of his collar one hand at a time, smoothing each place she had held. The bells in the tune were coming round for the last time. One of her hands, the one he had lost track of, steered him round toward the edge of the floor where Laura was waiting. The air stayed warm around them a while after it had any right to.

“Three kids,” Emi said.

“And a bad idea,” Andy completed it.

She smiled, and let him go.

The band laid their bows down. Nobody had asked them to. The cellist looked at the other players and set her bow across her knees, and the rest did the same. The hall played the last one by itself. It was the kind of plain, slow tune people hummed without knowing where they had learned it, and it came from the dome and the walls and the floor all at once, the way sound comes from everywhere in a church.

Laura came out onto the floor all together. Three of her, in white, crossing the blackwood at the same pace with the same small hitch at the same step, and she didn’t take his hands one at a time, or queue for him, or make him choose. She simply closed in. One of her in front of him and one at each shoulder, near enough that the hems touched, and the moment he had hold of her she began to turn, and he turned with her, and there was no space anywhere in it for one step to end before the next began.

He had watched the other six come and go. Laura didn’t go anywhere. She stayed.

“You know I could make this fair,” Andy said.

“Don’t you dare,” said all three of her.

He laughed; he had known what she would say. It came from in front of him and from both sides at once, and it was only ever the one voice.

The nearest of her looked up at the circlet. The blue rose sat in its socket above his brow, hard now, and bright, exactly the color of her eyes.

“It’s holding,” Laura said.

“It’s not going anywhere,” Andy said.

She didn’t answer that. They went once round the floor in silence, and he went down the bond, because he couldn’t not. She was here. She was entirely here—three of her, inside the circle of his arms. And the other reading was what it had been since the water, since breakfast, since three days ago: high, and steady, and not coming down.

“Yours is up,” Laura said, quietly.

“So is yours.” He didn’t make it gentle.

“It’s been up all day,” Laura said.

“I know.” He tightened his hand at the small of her back, the nearest of her, and all three of her felt it. “I’ve been checking it every ten minutes. I checked it during Sam’s toast.”

“I know you did. You always do.” One of her looked away, toward the long windows, just once, and then all three of her were looking at him again. “I’m scared, Andy.”

“Me too,” he said.

“I know.” She almost laughed. “You’re terrible at hiding it. You were terrible at it at thirteen.”

“I got worse.”

“You got much worse.” The turn carried them past the family tables and his mother lowered the camera and didn’t lift it again. “So we’re both scared. Fine. I don’t want to spend this song pretending we aren’t. There might not be—” She stopped. She started again, and didn’t finish that one either. “I want this song to be true all the way through.”

“Okay,” Andy said.

“Okay.” Her hands tightened on him, all six of them, in the same instant. “Then listen. I did a list once. On the footbridge, with Inanna watching. The cake. The sandwich. All of it.”

“I remember the list.” He could have recited it.

“I left things off it.” The hall’s tune went down, low and slow, and she went down with it. “I loved you on the footbridge. Both times. The first time too, in the rain, when I was so angry I couldn’t see and you came in after me anyway. I loved you when you tied a ribbon on a tree and signed it like an idiot. I loved you this morning, when your dad asked me to call him Dad, because the first thing I wanted after I said yes was to go and find you and tell you.” She took a breath that went through all of her. “I loved you in that house. In the dream. When she pointed at the Hotel and said it was ours.”

He couldn’t say anything for a moment. He let her have the silence instead, which was the only thing he had that was big enough.

“Emily asked me what I wanted,” Andy said, eventually. “Afterward. Something small.”

“And what did you say?” Laura asked.

“A Sunday,” he said. “Nothing happening. Coffee. Everybody coming downstairs in the wrong order.”

All three of her went still against him, and then soft.

“The boring house,” Laura said.

“The boring house.”

“That’s what I want, too.” She said it plainly, without any hope in it, as though putting it down on a table between them. “That’s all I ever wanted, you know. Small, stupid stuff. You in a kitchen.”

“You’re getting it.” It was out before he could stop it, and he didn’t try to take it back. “You’re not dying today. I told you that on the mound. I’m still telling you.”

“I know you are.” She didn’t argue. She didn’t agree, either. “Tell me again after the song. Right now I don’t want the promise. I want the song.”

So he gave her the song.

He didn’t say anything else. Neither did she. The hall kept playing, slow and plain, and they turned inside it, and he stopped counting steps and stopped watching the windows and stopped doing anything at all except holding on. Her forehead was against his chest. The other two of her had their faces against his shoulders. He could feel her breathing in three places, and after a while he couldn’t tell it apart from his own.

The last bars came.

He reached down the bond one more time, the way he had all day, bracing for it.

She was here. Exactly here.

And where the fear had been all day, there was nothing.

He checked again, carefully, in case he had it wrong. He didn’t. For the first time since the thinning began, three days ago, the bond came back with no fear in it at all. Not less. None. She was holding onto him with all six hands in the middle of a hundred and ten people, with the sky going wrong outside the windows, and she was not afraid.

He didn’t know what had done it. The saying it, maybe, or the song, or only being this close. He didn’t go looking.

He found he wasn’t afraid either.

He pulled all three of her a half-step closer. She came without a sound, as if she had been waiting for it.

The hall played the last note and held it under the dome, and neither of them moved to let it go.