Chapter Eight — The Things We Ask For (continued)

At 6:20, Luna stepped out of the library's side door with a paper cup of water and a plastic name badge still pinned crookedly to her dress.

Inside, the exhibition was working. The listening stations had queues. The cabinetmaker's daughter had asked whether the recording could be copied for her brother, and Priya was explaining the permissions process. Luna had managed to give her introduction without crying or dropping her index cards.

She had also managed not to check her phone until now.

It showed one missed call from Asher, placed at 6:13. She stared at it. He had tried again, at least. That should have meant something. Instead it made her think of the chair she'd moved so his view would be clear.

She called him back.

He answered on the second ring. "Luna? How did it go?"

"People came. They listened. The family of the man with the drawer was there."

"That's good. I really wanted to see it."

"You could have, if you'd told me at four-thirty what you knew by four-thirty."

A pause. Somewhere behind his voice a metal door shut.

"I didn't know at four-thirty," he said. "We thought we had one more adjustment."

"Then four-fifty. Five-oh-five. Any time before I started watching the door."

At the rehearsal building, Asher stood in a corridor off the loading bay, his jacket over one arm. The crew had finished the revised safety run. Nobody had been hurt. That mattered; he wouldn't pretend otherwise. But he'd been checking the clock for hours, and the fact that he'd still missed Luna made the whole afternoon feel like a test he'd failed by refusing to read the instructions.

"The cue couldn't be left unsafe," he said. "There were people who had to move through it in the dark on Tuesday. I needed to be there."

"I'm not telling you to leave people in danger. How many times do I have to say that?"

"I don't know what you want me to say. I couldn't walk out."

"You could call. You know how to call. You've apparently just demonstrated it twice."

He flinched. Then his pride, which had been waiting for the slightest excuse, came to his rescue in the least useful way possible.

"And you know how to let someone finish a sentence," he said. "Except when VESPER is involved."

Luna went still.

A pair of visitors came around the corner, speaking excitedly about the seamstress exhibit. Luna moved aside to let them pass, watching the wet pavement beside the bins rather than the people.

"What does VESPER have to do with you not coming to my opening?"

"You couldn't give me five minutes yesterday without checking whether he'd vanished. Today I couldn't give you an hour I thought I had. It seems like there's one schedule you're willing to understand and another you aren't."

"He never promised he'd be in that room. You did."

The words landed cleanly. Asher had nothing ready for them, and he hated that he had reached for the comparison at all. Yet there was a bruised part of him that still wanted her to admit she'd done something wrong yesterday, as if that could make today smaller.

"You told me not to make you compete with a notification," Luna said. "I heard you. I put the phone away. I asked you properly this morning because you said you wanted me to. And you answered properly. That's why I believed you."

"I meant it."

"I know. That's the part that makes this worse."

He dragged a hand down his face. Beyond the corridor window a technician was wheeling a case toward the trucks. He could explain the entire moving-wall problem, the tolerances, the reason one more test had become six. None of those details would change the time of the call he'd made.

"I should have warned you earlier," he said.

"Yes."

"And the chair joke was stupid."

"It wasn't just stupid, Asher. It made me feel like the thing I work on every day was a cute little hobby you could squeeze in between actual important things."

"That's not how I think about you."

"Then why does it sound like that when something goes wrong?"

He had no answer that wouldn't become another defense. For a moment he heard only her breathing and the faint sound of traffic at her end of the line.

"I watched that room fill up," Luna said. Her voice was lower now. "I saw a woman hear her father's voice for the first time in front of people who hadn't known him. And I was proud. I really was. I shouldn't have spent any of it thinking about the empty place beside her."

"Luna—"

"Don't tell me I shouldn't be upset because I had a good evening anyway."

"I wasn't going to."

He had been about to tell her he wished he'd been there. It was true, but he understood how cheap it would sound right now. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to go to the library, to put his arms around her and see the recordings and hear the stories. He also wanted to stop being the man who'd made her look at the door all evening. No arrangement of those wants could undo the hour he'd missed.

"You can be angry," he said. "I don't want you to think I don't care."

"I don't think you don't care." Luna looked at the doors, where Priya was waving a visitor toward the ramp. "I think you get scared of giving me bad news, and then you make a joke so you don't have to stand in it. And when I don't laugh, you bring up VESPER as if that's a debt I owe you."

He swallowed. "That was unfair."

"It was."

They stood in separate places with a silence neither could fill by winning.

"We said we'd talk around eight," Asher said at last. "Can I call you then, after you're finished?"

Luna watched rainwater creep along a crack in the pavement. Eight was barely an hour and a half away. She wanted to tell him not to call. She wanted to hear his voice when she was no longer standing beside the building where he'd failed to appear.

"You can try," she said. "But don't say it because you think it's what I want to hear."

"I'll call at eight."

"Okay."

It was not forgiveness. It wasn't a breakup either. Luna ended the call, took one long breath, and went back inside to help a child find the recording of a bus route. She could still do that, even angry.

Across town, Asher looked at the darkened screen. The public account in his pocket had been silent for days. It would have been so easy to say something on that account that reached millions of people without having to face one disappointed woman directly.

Instead he put the phone away and walked toward the rehearsal office, where his work was waiting and eight o'clock had become a promise he could no longer afford to treat lightly.