The coffee pot was mid-pour at 0532 and the steam was rising off the World's Okayest Consultant mug on the counter with the small chip on the rim Janet had had for two years.
I was at the counter with both hands on the granite. I had been at the counter since 0517. I had driven from the SRD office at 0314 after walking the territory map for an hour alone with AURORA-7 at the cool register and the strategic display holding the red along the P9C-218 vector and the corkboard on the office wall holding the note I had pinned three days ago. I had told myself in the car that I had come to Janet's for the coffee. I had told myself in the car twice. The second telling had been the moment I had known what I was actually here for.
Janet poured coffee into the mug. She poured coffee into her own mug. She set the pot back on the warmer. She put the kettle of milk in the microwave for fifteen seconds because she had stopped using cold milk in coffee in week three of us together for reasons she had never explained.
Cassandra was asleep upstairs. Janet had said so when I had come through the door. Janet had also said that Cassandra would not be up before 0700 because she had been up until 2300 with a paper, and that we had until then.
She had not said until then for what.
She had known.
I had known too.
I drank a quarter of the coffee. I put the mug down. I looked at her.
"Marry me."
Janet did not move for the count of one full second. She drank coffee. She set her mug down.
"Yes."
The exchange was six words. The steam had not yet risen all the way off the second pour. The pre-dawn grey through the east window had not yet started to admit the dawn-orange at the lower edge. The kitchen was quiet.
I did not move.
She did not move.
She picked up her mug again.
"This is not because of the war," she said.
I had not yet wondered. The line came before I could.
"I know," I said.
"I am saying it because in two weeks you will think it might be. I want it on the record now, between us, that it is not."
"Logged."
She almost smiled at that. She drank.
I drank.
We did not say anything for two minutes.
At 0541 she reached across the counter and put her hand on top of mine. The hand was warm from the mug. She held it there. She did not squeeze. She did not move it. She held my hand under hers on the granite at 0541 in her kitchen with the coffee still warm and the pre-dawn grey lifting one shade off the window.
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"There is a list of people I am going to call today."
"Yes."
"Cassandra first. After school."
"Yes."
"My mother second. After dinner. I will tell her last because she will cry and I will need to be braced."
"Okay."
"You will tell Hammond before I tell my mother."
"Yes."
"Anyone else you need to tell, you tell. I am not making a list for you."
"Thank you."
She took her hand off mine. She picked up her mug. She drank.
At 0612 I refilled both our cups. I had not eaten. Janet had cut two pieces of bread and put them in the toaster at 0608 and was buttering them at the counter when I sat down at the table by the east window.
I let the silence sit.
"Janet."
"Yes."
"I have a project plan for this."
She turned with the buttered toast on a small plate in her hand. She looked at me over the rim of her own mug.
"Of course you do."
"I will not show it to you."
"Thank you."
She did not laugh. She did smile. The smile was the one she had given me at the kitchen in week eight, the same shape and the same duration, two seconds of it, mostly in her eyes. I had been tracking the smile in a small private way I had never spoken of since the first one. The first one had been at the Denver restaurant when I had ordered dessert for the first time since transmigration. The second one was this one. There would be others; I would notice them in the moment and not afterward.
She set the toast on the table. She sat down across from me.
"You really do have a plan, don't you."
"Two pages."
"Drew."
"It exists. I will not show it to you. It exists for me, not for you."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"That is the most romantic thing you have ever said to me."
"I know."
She did laugh, then, just one beat of it, and she ate her toast.
At 0633 she stood up from the table to call her mother's home line for the morning check-in she did three times a week, and I went outside to my car in the driveway because what I had to do next would not fit at the kitchen table.
The car was cold. The pre-dawn grey had become real dawn while we had eaten. The orange at the east edge of the window had become a thin gold along the rooftops across Newport Avenue. I sat in the driver's seat with the door closed and my hand on the gear lever and my breath fogging the windshield.
Drew.
"Yes."
Narim's private channel. The one he opened to you at the diplomatic-staff dinner on day forty-nine.
"Open it."
Six-token burn for the encryption layer. Audio only.
"Authorized."
The channel opened. Narim's voice came up clean. He had been awake. He always had been awake when I had called, which I had thought about and had not asked him about.
"Director."
"Narim."
"You are well?"
"I am well. I am calling for a personal favor."
There was a small pause. The pause was Narim's diplomatic register registering the word personal and clearing the channel of any Curia-record reflex.
"Of course. Tell me."
"I need a ring. Tollan-grade, simple band, no stone. My fiancée wears a stud earring her daughter gave her at twelve. The ring should match the metal of the stud."
A pause of three seconds.
"I will see to it personally," Narim said. "May I ask one thing."
"Yes."
"Your fiancée — is this the Doctor Fraiser whose hand I shook at the Tok'ra trade ceremony on day sixty-two?"
"Yes."
"Then it will be a privilege. I will dispatch a courier with measurement protocols within forty-eight hours. The band itself will be in your possession by day one-zero-five."
"Thank you, Narim."
"Director."
"Yes."
"This is not for the Curia record."
"I know."
"It is not for the Curia record."
"Understood, Narim. Thank you."
The channel closed.
I sat in the car with my hand on the gear lever and my breath fogging the windshield. AURORA-7 came up at the cool register.
Drew.
"Yes."
Narim has just spent a personal-tier favor that he had been saving against a future Curia vote. He will not name what he was saving it for. He has given it to you.
"I owe him."
You owe him.
"Log it."
Logged.
I did not turn the key.
The dawn at the rooftops across Newport Avenue had become a full pale gold. The light came through the windshield. The light put a small bright reflection on the gear lever under my hand. The reflection moved as my hand moved by a quarter of a millimeter, the way a hand moves on a steering wheel when a man is breathing.
Through the kitchen window, Janet was on the phone. I could see her at the counter, the cordless against her ear, her left hand at her earring, her body angled toward the east window where the dawn was now full. Her mouth moved in the shape of a sentence I could not lip-read but the rhythm of which I recognized from years of meetings — she was saying something measured and careful, the sentence she would say to her mother in two hours wearing in here now.
I watched her until 0729.
At 0729 I started the car.
I did not pull out of the driveway yet. I sat with my hand on the gear lever and the engine warming and the windshield clearing and I watched Janet hang up the cordless and walk it back to its base and turn from the counter and walk toward the stairs to wake Cassandra.
She paused at the foot of the stairs.
She turned her head, deliberately, toward the kitchen window.
She looked at the car.
She lifted her hand, small, and put it flat against her chest at the spot where the necklace I had not yet bought her would sit. She held the hand there for a beat. She let it drop.
She went upstairs.
I shifted into reverse.
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