The room was very quiet.
Outside, the street did its ordinary nighttime things.
Ellie Harper looked at him with twelve years of a question in her eyes, and the lamp was warm, and Stanley Ford was somewhere across the city in an urban planning review session, and she had a wine glass she was no longer holding.
"Yes," she said.
Mike looked at her for a long moment. Then he lowered his hand from her chin and leaned back.
She blinked.
"It would have been good," he said, quietly. "The way things are good when two people are actually paying attention to each other and neither of them has learned yet to be careful."
He held her gaze. "You would have been the kind of good that stays with you."
She was still.
"But I left," he said. "And you had eleven years with someone who built a house with you and walked down your street and means every deliberate thing he does."
He looked at her directly. "That's not nothing, Ellie."
"I know it's not nothing," she said.
"Good," Mike said.
