"So how are you?"
"The cast is off. No real problems. Thanks for chasing that down."
" Yeah, thanks, Bren."
"So how are you getting along?"
" Fine." Another small silence. " I sort of expected you to call me."
He didn't know what he'd heard for a moment. He replayed it twice in his head and drew a measured breath.
"Bren?"
"Barb, there is no choice. There is no choice. I won't be calling you. You did what you had to do, I think you did the right thing —" He found a certainty in his own mind that he wasn't going back to Mospheira again. Not soon. Or not the same.
But he couldn't say it. Not to Barb. Not to Shawn. He couldn't let them draw the conclusion, or Tabini lost his fair broker. "I think you ought to work on it, give it a chance. Paul's a nice guy."
" I loveyou, Bren."
It wasn't even painful to hear that maneuver, except in the response and comfort-giving it asked of him. And in what it said about her that he'd never wanted to face. That had rung alarm bells the last time they'd talked. And the timing of the phone calls. And her message to him after he'd left. And her not showing up at the hospital. He'd thought in her turning away from him she was giving himthe reality dose. He doubted all of a sudden that she had it to give.
"Bren?"
Tears. He heard the quaver.
"I can't help you," he said. "I can't fix it. You hear me?"
" Bren. You don't know what it's like, youdon't know, you've got the whole government around you, and we protect you from it, everybody protects you from it, because you come home to rest, but we live with it, we live with it all the time, your mother's scared to answer her phone, your brother's scared— they're saying you've gone over, they're saying you're selling us out, and people believe it — people at work believe it, and it's ourfault, isn't it? And we're left here shaking our heads and saying, Oh, no, Bren's not like that, Bren wouldn't do that, Bren'sjust getting what he can get— but I've got reporters ringing my phone, I've got messages stacked up on the system, my parents are scared—"
"All the more reason to keep your distance from me."
"They say you're not coming home."
"Who says that?"
"People. Just people."
"I'm doing my job, Barb. Same as always." He hadn't been in the habit of lying to Barb. It was one more curtain falling. It was no worse for his mother or Toby than he'd already found out. That they hadn't come to the hospital began to make a certain amount of sense. And maybe it was a good reason and a good time to say a firm goodbye. Leave the game to those who had signed on for it. "You take care, Barb. Don't pay attention to fools. Don't tolerate them, either. If you're getting those calls, you call the police."
" I have. A lot of times you don't know about. I mean, a long time before this, Bren. A lot of times."
"Best I can do, Barb. Best I can say. I won't be calling. Hear? Don't put off the rest of your life. You made a good decision. Stick by it."
"Don't talk to me like that!"
"You know Wilson. That's my reality. It's not yours."
" Dammit, no— Bren, don't you hang up on me!"
"Don't overdramatize, Barb. It won't work. Good night, see you sometime, get it straightened out."
Herphone slammed down.
Good, he thought, and stood there a moment, aware there were servants near him. Always. Always witnesses. Atevi didn't have a single word for lonely. Just — without man 'chi.
He laid the handset in the cradle and stood there holding the aching arm against him; stood, with nowhere to go, now that he'd put paid to the account. He was hurt. He was disappointed in Barb. He'd thought Barb had things better put together. He'd thought — he didn't know. He'd thought maybe he was the one who lacked — whatever it took to form relationships. But it was one too many turnabouts, it was one too many richochets from decision to decision — and Barb expecting rescue. Barb expecting praise for living, which in his book, people just — somehow — did.
Maybe that was what he'd been for Barb. The fantasy life. The rescue from mundanity. When the real world piled up — when it rang phones and intruded on her in her life — she'd fled to Paul. When it kept after her and Paul didn't solve it — now she was mad at Paul and she loved him. Angry people on the street wasn't what Barb wanted to confront. That wasn't the fantasy she had. She just wanted the relationship to look forward to. The pie-in the-sky fix-up… when he got home— — -Always when he got home.
Not a charitable analysis. But from hurt, he was back to damned mad, and two totally disparate things fell into place: Paul and his computers. Him and his absences. It came to him that Barb didn't want engagement, didn't want day-to-day reality in a relationship. She wanted to wait. That was what she did. She'd go on waiting. No matter how he wrenched his gut to try to offend her — he couldn't. They'd fought before, and she'd find a reason to forgive him for the way he'd signed off; she'd stop being mad, she'd wait for him. She'd chatter with her friends at work, them with their on-again, off-again relationships.
She'd top all their crises with hers. She'd fantasize about him coining back. What she had— was always garbage. What she waited for — was always wonderful.
Far from charitable.
Damn right. But he was madder than he'd ever been in their relationship, and it went back to that not-so-chance-timed message she'd blasted him with. He was a man agencies used; transactions he understood, transactions he was used to tracking and evaluating. And he had a sense when the use had gotten outrageous, he recognized crisis-oriented timing, the phone calls timed to get your attention and leave you with no damn choices — every damn phone call she'd made was right when she damn well knew he was finishing his day and trying to get to sleep. He knew pressuring an opponent down to the limit, and a behavior that twined itself around late-evening emotionally fraught messages instead of level-headed waking-hour phone calls for an ex-lover assumed a pattern that really, really set off alarms in his gut; a pattern that argued that his subconscious had been better informed on the feelings he'd been getting than his waking brain had been for the last several years.
Tabini shoved you to the wall. The Department would.
The Department had. But you didn't have them in your bed, you didn't have them telling you they loved you: atevi didn't have the word, the Department had it flagged under restricted usage, and Barb just used it for what she currently wanted.
God, he'd learned at least some few things in semantics.
And while his mind was still in human-mode, and while he had his head momentarily clear of his own brand of wishful thinking, he picked up the handset again to deal with the other unpleasant and inevitable phone call on his own schedule, before he had to write that damned letter to Ilisidi.
"Nadi," he said to the Bu-javid operator, "ring Hanks-paidhi: this is Bren Cameron."
"Yes, nand' paidhi."