“I know.” He turned back to the pan. “How was it?”
I set the folder on the counter, label-side down.
“Fine. Routine.”
He nodded and didn’t push.
He had a gift for not pushing. He never asked the second question. I had been telling myself for four years that was respect. I had recently started wondering whether it was something else.
He poured me a glass of wine and I sat at the counter and watched him move around my kitchen with easy familiarity. At this point he knew where my saucepans lived better than I did.
“Seattle, right?” he said.
“Yep. I leave Wednesday for a week. Maybe two.”
“That’s longer than usual.”
“It’s a diplomatic thing. There are a lot of moving pieces.”
He nodded. He always nodded. He accepted the vague shape and the approximate duration and moved on without ever once asking the question that would make me have to actually lie to him.
I had loved that about him for four years. Lately, the relief had started to feel a little too much like loneliness.
Mama had been making this case for a year.
Mija.My mother’s voice surfaced, uninvited and perfectly timed, as always.Four years and no ring. You know what that means.
It means he’s taking his time,Mamá.
It means he’s comfortable. Men who are comfortable don’t change. You want a man who’s a little uncomfortable. A man who’s afraid of losing you.
I drank my wine.
“You get quiet before the big ones,” Nate said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was stirring something. He wasn’t pushing.
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are.” He glanced over his shoulder and smiled.
We ate at the counter. He told me about a server migration at work that had gone sideways in exactly the way he’d told them it would. I asked the right questions and laughed at the right beats and was, for an hour, just a woman eating dinner with a man who loved her.
It wasn’t hard. It had never been hard.
Nate was warm and funny and present in the generous, uncomplicated way he did everything. His interior matched his exterior. He had never once asked me to open a door I wanted closed.
Some nights, that felt like love. Some nights, it felt like proof he had never noticed the door.
After dinner, he kissed my temple on the way to the couch. “Come watch something when you’re ready.”
I listened to the television from the kitchen and opened the folder instead.
* * *
Martin Solberg wasn’t attending the dinner. He was sending his son.
You didn’t send your heir to a rival clan’s table for a routine trade meeting unless you were making a statement, and I had been in this job long enough to know that whether the statement waswe trust youorwe aren’t afraid of youdepended entirely on which version of dragon politics you happened to believe in.
The Norwegian council’s posture on rare-earth sales had been hardening for three years. The State Department attributed the shift to Martin Solberg’s personal conservatism. I attributed it to a quietermovement inside the Norwegian council, one that had less to do with Martin and more to do with three elders who had been getting older and more nervous in the same six years.