She had mentioned this at dinner. Briefly, in passing. He had, apparently, been listening to all of it.
"Yes," she said.
"When was the last time you ate dinner with him. Just dinner. Not a compound event, not guests, not cultivation business. Just the two of you."
The answer that arrived was not the one she wanted to give.
She pressed her mouth tighter.
"The tower," he said. "You mentioned the tower."
"He built it for me." The words had a raw quality. "Three months. He built it so I would have the best view of my territory."
"That was eleven years ago."
The sentence landed.
She had not thought of it in that sequence before. Not because she was a bad person — she was not a bad person, she loved her husband, the Oxytocin suppression had not eliminated that — but because the Cortisol was selecting the specific, most-painful frames from her memory and putting them in sequence for her, and the sequence had a logic she was not resisting right now.
Eleven years ago.
The tower.
