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There are four bedrooms in the house.
There are four beds.
Harrow knows this because she has seen them—or she must have seen them on that first day when they’d walked through the new structure like a group of schoolchildren on a tour.
Pyrrha had made sure that there were linens, clean and soft. The pillows were new and filled with feathers, and the doors were secure and fitted with locks. There were curtains to close when there was too much light. The rooms were even outfitted with fans, which sounded like the life support systems they’d all fallen asleep to for their entire lives.
Those rooms would have been the perfect places to lay down and rest, but on their first night in the house, none of them wanted to be alone. They dragged sheets from drawers and pillows from beds. Camilla had hoisted an entire mattress onto her shoulders, then went back for another. Wanting to feel helpful, Gideon snagged a chair from somewhere and jury-rigged a tent-like contraption over the whole mess while Palamedes stood back and offered sensible input.
It reminded Harrow too much of her river bubble and the rag-tag team of spirits huddling together in the Second’s quarters. The difference was that they’d all been dead, and this group was offensively alive.
At least, Harrow assumed they were alive. She’d lost the ability to sense others, to detect life. Gideon’s body was as quiet as it had been when she’d been the mega-dead Kiriona. To feel her new heart beating would mean touching her. Without necromancy, she’d have to prod and palpate in search of her pulse. She did not feel it was her place.
She did not yet have a place here.
Contemplating their new, old mortality was too much for the four of them. They were all so fragile now in their renewed, ever-dying bodies. There was no more magic, and there were no more miracles. There was only life, life, life, and the hanging permanence of whatever came after.
But for now, at least, there was a blanket fort.
During the first few days, Hect didn’t speak, and she barely acknowledged Harrow. She was present, and her body moved her forward through time, but her vigilance was tangible. If she could not see or hear Palamedes, she was not okay. When Camilla was not okay, nobody was okay. Her intensity sucked the moisture out of the air, and Gideon immediately began making jokes that nobody laughed at. Desperate to be alone but unable to be apart from Palamedes, the only solution was for the two of them to disappear, leaving Harrow and Gideon to endure one another’s company.
The night she heard Sextus and Hect muttering to one another in the dark came with an air of relief. The four of them were too close together to have secrets from one another. They were still far too drained to want any.
“If there’s anything you want—”
“Nothing, Warden.”
“You’re entitled to something frivolous.”
“This all seems frivolous.”
“What? The house?”
“We have too many bodies. There is too much of us. I can’t keep track.”
“Here,” Palamedes said, and there was a shifting, a rustling. Without looking, Harrow understood that they were holding one another. Camilla was attempting to burrow into Palamedes’ sternum.
Gideon did not attempt to return to Harrow’s body in that way. Sometimes they slept separately, and sometimes they slept together, but they never touched. Even extended eye contact was often too much.
Each night, on the other mattress, Palamedes continued asking.
“Cam, darling girl. You must want something. You are allowed to want something.”
“I want you to go to sleep,” she said one night.
“I want you to ask more interesting questions,” she suggested on another.
Harrow found herself laying awake and thinking about how she might respond to the same query.
I want you to touch me, she thought she might say, and continue touching me, even if I jerk away. Pursue me. Forgive me.
But nobody asked. Nobody asked anything at all except Palamedes of Camilla, night after night.
One such night, not long before Hect and Sextus moved back into their own shared quarters, Camilla replied in earnest.
“I want my blanket,” she’d said in her ever-even tone. Harrow heard sheets rustling as long, slender legs untangle themselves from a quilt. “Not that blanket,” Cam amended.
“The prescription from psych?”
“Right.”
“Are you having the falling dream again? Have I been sleeping that soundly?”
Cam didn’t reply—or perhaps she did, in some non-verbal way. It was quiet for a long time before she muttered, “Shouldn’t’ve let go.”
There was a small sound. He kissed her, maybe. A peck.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Sure.”
They spoke no more.
Harrow did not have a falling dream. If she dreamt at all, she didn’t remember, but she hardly slept enough for it to matter. There weren’t enough hours in the day to learn all the things she needed to learn to feel worthy of personhood.
At 1:00 AM, she read cookbooks by candlelight. At 3:00 AM, she worked on a book of puzzles. At 6:00 AM, she knit a few rows, then ripped them apart.
She learned to cook oatmeal. Sometimes, she wrote the correct number in the puzzle box. She learned she doesn’t care much for knitting.
The only other resident of the house who speaks to her with any regularity is Sextus. Gideon tries, but their conversations are consistently glaringly empty things: the weather on this moon, dinner smells good, your hair’s getting long, good oatmeal today.
Sextus, at least, tries. He’s writing stories, and he asks for her opinion on their sordid plots. They talk about life without necromancy and how old habits die hard. He is reading thick books about complementary medicine. Once a week, Camilla follows him to a small nearby clinic for an internship that he arranged for himself. Often, they talk about what he sees there. He is amazed by human resilience and the body’s capacity to heal.
Harrow does not talk to Camilla Hect, and Camilla Hect does not talk to Harrow. On a good day, she might receive a nod for her troubles. Sometimes, a single word: here, sure, okay.
That would have been acceptable if Camilla hadn’t started talking to Gideon.
She tells herself that it isn’t jealousy. Harrow has no interest in sparring or press-ups, or whatever it is they discuss. Those two are new friends, somehow, despite surviving an eternity of strife together. They have things to share, and she and Gideon do not. Not yet.
“I do not care if Camilla Hect likes me,” Harrow announced one day, seemingly out of nowhere, “I simply wish to know why, precisely, she doesn’t. I haven’t offended her.”
She was in the living room with Palamedes while Cam and Gideon sat on the bench swing on the porch. Through the window, Harrow could see that Gideon was sitting like an imbecile, her legs thrust out in front of her, propelling the glider with her heels and her hips. Cam sat like a stone beside her, smirking intermittently as the ginger swordswoman monologued.
Pal looked up from his book, pushing his glasses up his nose, blinking the wrong eyes in the right face. “What gives you the impression that Cam doesn’t like you?” he asked. Harrowhark balked, her dark brows diving toward her nose in indignation.
“You are oblivious,” she observed, still gazing out the window. Hect had stretched one muscular leg out in front of her, pushing the bench forward, even as she continuously looked back, never quite going anywhere.
“Enlighten me, then. I’ll admit I have my blind spots, but from my vantage point, she’s been nothing but polite,” Palamedes responded in his gentle way, looking at Harrow even as she watched the cavaliers.
“Polite, yes,” she agreed, “But hardly forthcoming. She is more than usually restrained.”
“She’s trying. Are you?”
Harrow blinked. Was she?
“Nevermind,” she said.
“We like you,” he assured her once more, rising from his spot to place a hand on her shoulder. She allowed it, breathing through her nose. The longer they cohabitated, the easier it was to get used to his proclivity for physical touch. She reminded herself that he was no longer a psychometrist. He wasn’t prying. He just did that.
She hummed quietly in response. The gangly man squeezed. Harrow did not entirely dislike it, but she was still relieved when he let go.
“What you have to understand is that it’s complicated, Harrow,” he went on. “When it comes to us, all of us, it will always be complicated. Truthfully, you and Cam are two of the most intelligent people I know, and I have no doubt that you can grapple with that complexity in your own time. Keep trying. She will, too. I’ll help if I can.”
“I don’t need help, Sextus.”
“You need sleep, in my estimation.”
“I sleep perfectly fine,” she lied.
Palamedes grew still for a moment. There was a look in his eyes like he’d just cracked a puzzle all at once. “I need to check on something,” he explained, then walked swiftly out the door. Cam dashed after him, though no words were exchanged between the two.
Still draped across the swing, Gideon turned around and met her eyes.
“Sit up, Griddle,” Harrow instructed loudly enough that her voice traveled through the window plex, “You look slovenly.”
“That’s what I was going for,” she shouted back, waggling her ginger brows.
Despite herself, Harrow went and took up Hect’s abandoned spot on the swing. Gideon continued pushing, her arms draped across the backrest. It was the closest they’d come to touching in weeks. She could still feel the ghost of Palamedes’s squeeze on her shoulder. She could feel the warmth Cam had left behind on the bench.
The rocking was making her sleepy—or, perhaps, her lack of sleep was making her sleepy. The combination was lethal. Without necromancy to bolster her system, Harrow’s eyelids became heavy, and her breathing became slow.
She woke up an indeterminate period of time later, her face pancaked against Griddle’s hefty thigh. The thigh was gently vibrating with speech.
“—don’t want to wake her up.”
“I was not asleep, you presumptuous dolt,” she grumbled, ignoring the crusty moisture covering her cheek.
“‘Course you weren’t. My mistake,” Gideon smirked.
When Harrow opened her eyes (which she’d only closed because she wasn’t used to all the light on this moon, thank you ), the first thing she saw were the borrowed lambent grays currently in the face of Camilla Hect. They were looking right at her.
“I’m glad you’re up,” Palamedes said brightly, “Cam wants to show you something.”
—
Camilla Hect liked knowing what to expect. That meant fostering and honing consistent and reliable strengths. It meant becoming aware of her weaknesses and understanding how to effectively compensate. It meant training hard, revising diligently, and rehearsing interactions in her mind.
If she could predict how a situation would go—a duel, an exam, a conversation—it afforded her a comforting measure of control. She didn’t mind failing if she ran the odds in advance and expected to fail. She didn’t mind pain if she had a warning and could brace herself against it.
She was superlative at failure. She’d done it a lot lately.
Still, preparation was the anchor that kept her fidgety body grounded—or it was supposed to be. The issue was that prepared or unprepared, Camilla Hect’s natural inclination had always been to float. If a scholar from data was to take a survey of her most common nightmare motifs, they’d discover a trend: gravity, or a striking lack thereof.
The worst was when her dreams ended in the sensation of falling, every muscle in her body engaging in concert to catch her, even as she lay prone in bed. Granted, it always put an immediate end to her strife. She opened her eyes, steadied her breathing, and there he was. Easy. Efficient.
Too easy. Too efficient. She never, ever trusted it. Instead, she convinced herself she was trapped in some recursive loop, that if she’d only held on, she could have discovered the solution, walked the endless labyrinth, solved the ever-changing puzzle.
She’d mentioned the falling once in her youth, during her annual physical, when asked about mental health complaints. She had divined, by then, that saying nothing was more damning than admitting to some modicum of reasonable human anxiety. She’d brought up her discomfort with the falling sensation—no more, no less—and she’d been prescribed a weighted blanket for her trouble.
She’d hated it at first, that bulky, cumbersome symbol of weakness, and had been humiliated the first time Palamedes had attempted to lift it. Naturally, he wanted to know what it was and why it was. He’d felt bad for prodding, after the fact, not having realized it was sensitive, but she was ultimately relieved to have one less secret to guard.
He’d tried it for himself once. He claimed he’d felt smothered, and she worried he’d be smothered, as slight as he was, so she’d kept it in her own shuck, all to herself.
Awake or asleep, it was much easier to be your own anchor when you were swathed in a sea of fabric equal to 10% of your total body weight. As it settled over her vibrating limbs, the relief was almost instantaneous. She’d missed it on New Rho, but she’d borne the weight of so many other things, then.
But now she had him, and that should have been enough. Unfortunately, having him meant being herself. Being herself meant reckoning with what she’d done and why. It meant sitting with her selfishness despite knowing that, if it were still possible, she’d do it again.
It also meant looking Nona—no, not Nona, Harrowhark —in the eye day after day. It served to remind Cam just how far gone she’d been at the end. She’d been so busy loving him that it hadn’t occurred to her that their charge had become both more than a duty and less than one. She’d left Nona in that instant, just as she’d been left.
And now she was gone.
Camilla didn’t know where to put all of that strange, delayed grief. The container that was her body alone was insufficient, and it so rarely was.
She had loved Nona. She had. And now she didn’t know how to love Harrowhark. Or, perhaps, she was afraid to try. Palamedes loved her enough for the both of them, didn’t he? And when the both of them had meant Paul, no one had brokered any complaints.
She was ready for the rules to stop changing. She was ready for a night of genuinely sound sleep. So, because she knew it would make Palamedes happy, she’d decided to want something.
That afternoon on the swing, she’d stood up and followed him without a thought. She was getting marginally better at being apart from him now, but down the road was beyond the acceptable range.
“I hoped you’d come along,” he said, by way of greeting, as if the possibility existed that she wouldn’t have, “I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“A proposition,” she echoed.
“And it is a proposition, Cam. Not an order. Never an order.”
He was doing that a lot these days—qualifying everything he asked of her, perhaps because they hadn’t had to do that as Paul. It was possible there was an alternate reason, but she wasn’t interested in any other explanation.
“Go on,” she urged.
“Harrow isn’t sleeping. Thoughts?” It was obvious by then that they were headed toward the little town center.
“Maybe she’s nocturnal,” Cam supplied drolly.
“She doesn’t sleep during the day, either.”
“She’s an adult.”
“And I will posit that adults also need restful sleep. Does adulthood supersede friendship in this or any instance?”
“If you distract her, I’ll sedate her. She’s small. It shouldn’t take much.”
“You’re missing information. This might clarify things,” Palmedes explained as he knocked on the door of one of the other small homes in the neighborhood. As it turned out, he was calling on a neighbor that they’d met at the clinic—a local fiber artist who had a package for him. It became clear very quickly that the Warden could not lift the package himself.
Inside was a handmade quilt that could have been a replica of her old one. It was dark gray and hand-stitched, divided into perfectly square weighted pockets. The material was softer than she remembered, perhaps made from some local, organic fiber.
He’d had it commissioned in exchange for a favor, he said, and if she could carry it home, it was hers.
She hoisted it up easily, knowing it would be worth the reward. Palamedes would sleep well knowing he’d done his good deed for her. She’d sleep well pressed flat under the weight of the hefty covers, knowing the Warden was happy. Maybe they’d wake in the morning, and everything would finally feel okay.
Even just carrying the package was grounding, which made it easier to focus when the Warden began speaking again.
“So,” he’d said, “About Harrow.”
Mutely, Cam raised her brows. She thought she knew where this was going, but she wasn’t about to say anything. He’d make it seem like it was her idea.
“She thinks you’re upset with her.”
“Okay.”
“Are you?”
“Why would I be?”
“Right. I told her as much,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “But I also told her you were making an attempt, and I’m not sure that was entirely honest.”
“I’m polite enough.”
“Which is the minimum responsibility of a housemate, and I’d like to think we’re more than that. As long as I’ve known you, meaning my whole life, my whole death, and everything that came after, you’ve never been the type to do the minimum. I can’t figure out what’s changed. Well, other than the obvious.”
Camilla did not respond right away. She’d hoped that this would have been one of the situations in which he understood without having to be told. She wanted him back inside of her brain, seeing through her eyes. She hated feeling things without him, knowing things without him.
Would it ever be easy again?
Suddenly, she wished she wasn’t holding the stupid package. She wanted to be touching him. Somehow, he seemed to know this. He veered into her so they were walking arm-to-arm.
After a long moment of silence, Cam said, “What do you propose?”
“An olive branch,” he suggested, “ Acta, non verba. You need to make nice, and she needs the sleep. It’s big enough for the both of you. Will you consider it?”
“Sure.”
“Right. Will you do more than consider it?”
Cam hummed noncommittally. The Warden paused completely, removing his glasses and cleaning the lenses on his shirt as he spoke.
“Believe me when I tell you I understand that it’s hard, but I’m sure it must’ve been hard for Harrow to love Paul. You can’t forget that she lost us, too.”
“I haven’t forgotten, Warden.” She licked her chapped lips, staring straight ahead toward the house and the swing. She sighed deeply through her nose. “Fine.”
“But for her, Cam, and for you. Not for me.” He put his glasses back on.
For Nona, Cam thought to herself, she’d like that I was kind. But she nodded.
They walked the rest of the way back to the house in comfortable silence.
—
Upon coherence, Harrowhark noticed that Hect was holding some sort of box.
Presumably, this box contained the object that she wished to show her. Though Harrow desperately wanted to feign disinterest, her fatal flaw had always been an unquenchable desire to know . She was, after all, the necromancer who had opened The Locked Tomb and released The Death of God. She never could resist the siren song of A Thing in a Box.
“I want a present. Why does Harrow get a present?” Griddle protested from her spot on the swing. There was a red splotch on her thigh, approximately the side of Harrow’s cheek.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Harrow snipped automatically, but it was an empty threat. There really wasn’t much she could do—or would do—to her these days, and they both knew it.
“It’s a present for Cam, actually,” Sextus corrected.
“Alright, then why does she get a present?” Gideon resumed propelling the swing with one muscular leg.
“It’s a blanket,” Cam explained, hoisting it upward, “I had one like it, before.”
“It’s an evenly weighted source of deep pressure that works to stimulate your tactile sensory receptors,” Sextus explained, addressing Harrow directly, as a peer. “It triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and floods the brain with neurotransmitters, predominantly serotonin and dopamine, shutting down your stress response in its tracks.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, considering this.
“Alright, cool,” Griddle said, the first to break the silence, “The fuck does that mean?”
“It’s heavy,” Cam responded flatly, succinctly, rocking a bit on her heels, “Helps you sleep.”
“You wish to smother me for my health?” Harrow asked, brow caught in a severe furrow.
“Essentially,” Sextus chirped too pleasantly, “Cam’s about to try it. We thought you might like to join her.”
“You are suggesting that I nap with your cavalier,” Harrow said, baffled.
Hect looked at Sextus, Sextus looked at Harrow, and Gideon looked at the whole trio of them like they were all members of another species entirely.
“No, thank you,” Harrow said at last, her voice clipped—at which point Gideon stood up, caught her about the waist, and hoisted her upward.
“Where do you want this?” she asked, even as Harrow thrashed and cursed. The fact that there wasn’t much that Harrow could do to Gideon didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty that Gideon could do to her. While Harrow’s lack of necromancy and Gideon’s lack of divinity should, theoretically, have put them on even footing for the first time in their lives, Gideon’s workout routine meant she maintained the upper hand in situations such as this one.
“Mattress in the living room,” Cam supplied helpfully.
Gideon saluted with her free hand and led the way, ushering the troops through the screen door. When they arrived, she dropped Harrow unceremoniously on the mattress. She bounced.
When she stopped bouncing, Gideon tackled her.
It was the most contact they’d had in—Harrow wasn’t certain how long. She writhed and fought, but in a futile way, like a fish on a hook, hoping for a one-in-a-million miracle but certainly not expecting one.
“Get—off—me—you—barbarous—insolent—simpleton!” she spat.
“Don’t think I will, but thanks for the offer,” the barbarous, insolent simpleton grinned, “It’s for your own good. Let SexPal stimulate your sympathy receptors and give us all a break.”
“That is not remotely what that means.”
“Shhhh,” Griddle soothed mockingly, “Shhhh. Naptime. Are you two coming, or what?” she called out to the Sixth.
“I’m waiting for Cam to make herself comfortable.”
“Ah, well, that’s on you,” Gideon shrugged.
Meanwhile, Harrow had gone limp and listless beneath her cavalier’s weighty bulk. She didn’t have the energy to continue her futile fight. The best she could do was play possum and hope they all lost interest. It did, however, mean she had a decent vantage point of Hect and Sextus—though she was mostly looking up their noses.
She watched as Hect looked at Sextus, seeming to have an entire conversation without saying a word. She’d raise her brows. He’d cock his head. She’d roll her eyes. He’d shut his tiredly, massaging his temple. She’d lick her lips. He’d look into her eyes. And then, as if they’d come to some sort of consensus, Camilla toed off her shoes, lined them up beside the mattress, and sat beside her.
Harrow had to admit she’d had worse bedmates—Ianthe Tridentarius, for one, and she’d slept beside her willingly. Camilla was dedicated and dutiful to the point of lunacy. She was deathly competent and had only ever been an amicable ally. Most importantly, Sextus trusted her.
Therefore, there was no reason she should balk over the prospect of lying beside the woman in their own home—no reason, of course, except for that clawing, niggling feeling that Camilla didn’t like her. Harrowhark Nonagesimus did not live her life in the interest of being liked , but this felt utterly inane.
She wanted Camilla Hect to like her.
That realization led to a deep sense of shame, as if wanting to be liked—or even simply more than tolerated—was inherently reprehensible. She should not have to want that, let alone feel as though she needed that. Those feelings should have nothing to do with this woman, this stranger, who was kind to her cavalier and to Sextus.
But if she knew anything about Camilla Hect, it was that she devoted her entire self to just about anything that breathed.
Anything, it seemed, except Harrow.
“Get off me,” she muttered so softly and earnestly that Griddle listened without a fight. She turned her body to face the wall, tucking her boney knees up into her belly. She looked like a child who’d been punished, sullenly waiting out the duration of a time-out.
On the other side of the mattress, Camilla Hect did the same. They lay back to back, gazes far away, focused anywhere but on one another. Meanwhile, Sextus wrestled with the heavy blanket, struggling until Gideon took pity on him and did the honors.
Once Cam and Harrow were little more than shapely lumps beneath the covers, Griddle stood back and left Sextus to his sappy night-night routine.
First, he kissed Hect on the forehead. Then he kissed Harrow. Someone shut the curtains over the windows, and the room went dark. The front door opened, and two sets of footsteps retreated. The front door shut.
It was only then that Harrow realized that her heart rate was slowing. She was letting go of tension she didn’t realize she had been holding onto. She felt like a pikelet, or a puddle, or a piece of flimsy nestled in an envelope. She felt like a body in a tomb. Right here, right now, she didn’t have to be anything but flat and still and quiet.
She probably could have fallen asleep just like that if a deep, affectless voice beside her hadn’t spoken her name.
—
Camilla Hect was so rarely still. She couldn’t think if she wasn’t in motion, checking in on her body, knowing for certain that she could rely on every part of it. Under the weight, she could feel every part of herself at once.
Still, she rolled her wrists and her ankles, bent and unbent her toes. She rubbed her feet together like a cricket and cracked each of her knuckles in turn. In the quiet, muffled by the fan, she could hear Palamedes speaking softly to Gideon, likely just outside the window. If she lifted her head just a bit, she could see his gangly silhouette against the curtains. Just for a moment, with the quilt weighing her down, she felt like she was home again.
She felt like she was home, but she didn’t feel like a child. She didn’t entirely know what it meant to feel like a child.
The only time she’d come close to feeling that way was during incredibly adult moments of solitude, of utter helplessness, when she was expected to make an impossible decision. She’d felt very much like a child back on New Rho, for example, when Nona—
Camilla’s entire body stiffened. She took a breath through her nose. She counted to five. She released the breath.
If she felt like a child now, it was because she was on a bed next to that body—a body she’d cared for, and nourished, and, yes, loved. She was next to a body she’d let down. She was next to a body that had once contained someone she’d lost.
Two people , she reminded herself. She’d had Harrow first. She’d lost Harrow first.
She could hear the Warden and the Ninth on the swing, laughing. She was forced to acknowledge that the tried-and-true remedy for feeling like a child had always been to act like an adult anyway.
“Nonagesiumus,” she said flatly. With any luck, the other woman would already be asleep.
“Yes?” came a tiny voice from the bed beside her.
Damnit. Cam counted to ten in her mind before she spoke.
“I’m not upset with you,” she said, hoping it would be enough.
There was another long silence. Just when Camilla convinced herself Harrow had fallen asleep, she replied with a very small, very earnest, “You have been cold.”
“That’s my personality.”
“But it isn’t ,” Harrow insisted, this time replying at once. “Please tell me what it is I’ve done. I can’t live this way, wondering.”
That would be Harrow’s personality, then.
“You remind me of someone.”
“Annabel.”
Yes, Cam thought, but no .
“Someone you’ve never met,” she said, but thought: someone you can never meet. Someone I failed.
“And we were alike?” Harrow asked tentatively.
At that, Cam smiled her tiny, lovely smile into her pillow. “No,” she said, laughing silently, “God, no.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
Cam chose that moment to fight the blanket and readjust, turning around to face the fetal form of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, a view she’d seen many times before—and, somehow, a view she was seeing for the first time.
Harrow did the same, struggling under the weight, flailing muscleless arms, not unlike—well, a worm with problems . It was a tiny action that, nevertheless, filled the cavalier with a deep affection. Automatically, Cam reached over to help her, carrying some of the weight.
That was her personality.
—
They were face to face now. They were eye to eye.
“What do you need,” Hect asked, “to fall asleep?”
When Harrow thought of sound sleep, she thought of her cell on the Ninth, of cold and dark and quiet. She thought of austerity and solitude. She thought of deep loneliness and bleeding wounds. She recalled the profound, midnight longing that she could only look back on with embarrassment.
“Quiet,” Harrow said.
“She liked stories,” Hect explained, “Bits from magazines. Or she liked talking until she couldn’t keep her eyes open.”
Harrow’s mind only went to one place when she thought about magazines, and she blanched. Evidently, Camilla clocked this.
“I like quiet, too,” she said.
And they were quiet, but they weren’t alone.
Harrow’s eyes closed first.
Cam’s followed.
And, finally, they slept.