The morning Asher Lane stepped onto the campus of Vexley Imperial University, he told himself it was just a coincidence.

It had to be.

The university's name was printed on his scholarship letter in clean, embossed gold — *Vexley Imperial University, Est. by the Vexley Foundation* — and he had stared at that name for three whole minutes before folding the letter and placing it back in its envelope. Then he had taken it out again. Stared at it again. Folded it again.

*Reve Vexley.*

Seven years was a long time. Long enough to grow up. Long enough to bury people. Long enough to convince yourself that a name was just a name and not something you carried like a stone in your chest everywhere you went.

He shouldered his bag and walked through the iron gates.

The campus was obscenely beautiful. That was the only word for it — *obscene.* The kind of beautiful that reminded you exactly how much money had gone into every cobblestone, every sculpted hedge, every fountain that caught the September light and fractured it into something that looked almost like warmth.

Asher had learned, a long time ago, not to be impressed by money.

He had also learned, a long time ago, that money had a smell. Old wood, cold marble, something faintly floral underneath — like someone had pressed a bouquet into the walls themselves. He knew that smell. Had known it since he was ten years old, sitting in the back garden of the Vexley estate, eating stolen plums with a boy who laughed too loud and shared everything he owned without being asked.

He shook the memory loose.

*Don't.*

He found his classroom building on the map and walked with purpose, because that was the only way he knew how to walk anymore. Like he had somewhere to be. Like someone was expecting him. Even when neither of those things was true.

It was the cologne that stopped him.

He was in the corridor outside lecture hall B-4, adjusting the strap of his bag, half-reading the notice board, not really paying attention — when it hit him.

Faint. Expensive. Sandalwood and something darker underneath, something almost smoky, like paper burning slowly in a quiet room.

He had smelled that cologne before. More times than he could count. On a figure in a dark coat who sat beside him on a park bench the night his last part-time job let him go. On a stranger in a mask at the edge of every gathering he'd wandered through alone. On the night he was seventeen and the world had gone so quiet and terrible that he'd sat on a rooftop and just *breathed* — and somehow that scent had drifted up to him from the street below like an answer to a question he hadn't asked out loud.

He always noticed.

He had never said.

Asher turned slowly, the way you turn when you already know what you're going to see and you want one last second before you have to deal with it.

At the end of the corridor, surrounded by three assistants and a tablet and the controlled chaos of someone whose time was worth more per minute than most people earned in a month — stood Reve Vexley.

He was smaller than Asher remembered. Or maybe he had always been small and Asher had just forgotten, the way you forget things that hurt to hold onto. His suit was the color of deep water. His hair was pushed back from his face like he'd done it impatiently, the way he always used to when he was thinking hard about something. His jaw was sharper now. The softness that Asher remembered from childhood — the boy who used to fall asleep in textbooks and steal plums and laugh too loud — had been replaced by something quieter and more dangerous.

He was looking down at a document.

He hadn't seen Asher yet.

*Good,* Asher thought. *Good. Walk away. He's busy. You're nobody here. Walk—*

Reve looked up.

Seven years folded in on themselves like paper.

For exactly two seconds, neither of them moved.

Then Reve's expression shifted — barely, just at the edges, the way still water moves when something beneath the surface stirs — and he said, with a composure that Asher privately found offensive:

"Asher Lane."

Not a question. Not surprise. Just his name, said like Reve had been keeping it somewhere and had simply now taken it out.

Asher smiled. Clean. Easy. The smile he had practiced for seven years.

"Reve." He tilted his head. "You own my university."

"I own several universities."

"How comforting."

Something flickered in Reve's eyes — quick, almost invisible, gone before Asher could name it. One of the assistants said something quietly and Reve responded without looking away from Asher, dismissing them with a gesture so slight it barely qualified as movement.

"You look well," Reve said.

*You've been watching me for years,* Asher did not say. *I know it's you. I've always known it's you.*

"Thanks," he said instead. "Scholarship life agrees with me."

Reve's gaze moved across him once — unhurried, thorough, the way you look at something you've been worrying about from a distance and are now confirming, privately, is intact.

"Are you settled?" Reve asked. "Housing. Food. The transition."

"I manage."

"I know you do."

The words landed quietly. Too quietly. Asher held his smile in place and did not examine what was underneath it.

"I should get to class," he said.

"Of course." Reve stepped aside. Then, just as Asher passed: "Lecture hall B-4 moved to C-2 this semester. The notice went out last week."

Asher stopped.

He looked at the notice board. There it was — small, half-covered by a flyer for a student club. *B-4 relocated to C-2, effective Monday.*

He looked back at Reve.

Reve was already looking at his document again, expression neutral, entirely too composed for someone who had just casually revealed that he knew Asher's class schedule on his first day of enrollment.

*He knows,* Asher thought. *He always knows.*

*And he thinks I don't notice.*

Asher turned and walked toward C-2.

He was smiling — a different smile now, smaller, real, pressed to the inside of his mouth where no one could see it.

*Two floors above, in an office that overlooked the entire campus, a second phone sat on a desk beside the primary one. It was never used for calls. It contained one album. The album had no title.*

*Reve set down his document.*

*He stood at the window.*

*Below, a figure in a worn jacket crossed the courtyard toward the C-wing, bag over one shoulder, walking like he had somewhere to be.*

*Reve watched until he disappeared through the doors.*

*Then he picked up his document again.*

*He did not look at the phone.*

*He didn't need to.*

### *— Asher's POV —*

Thursday had decided, personally and deliberately, to ruin him.

It started at 6:14 in the morning when the alarm on his secondhand phone went off and he lay there for exactly forty-three seconds staring at the water stain on his apartment ceiling, running the math in his head the way he did every morning now. Not because he enjoyed it. Because if he didn't run it before he got up, it would chase him through the whole day instead.

Rent — due in nine days.

Textbooks — two still unpaid, one borrowed from a classmate who was starting to ask for it back.

Shift at Maple Café — 7 to 10 AM, then again 5 to 9 PM.

Classes — 10:30, 1:00, 3:15.

Assignment due — Friday, which was tomorrow, which was a problem because he hadn't started it.

Sleep — optional, apparently.

He got up.

The café was the kind of small that became suffocating by 8 AM. Three tables by the window, a counter that had seen better decades, and an espresso machine that required negotiation every single morning. Asher had learned its moods. He treated it the way you treat an unreliable but essential person in your life — with patience, with respect, and with the private knowledge that one day it was going to let him down catastrophically.

He took orders. He made drinks. He smiled at people who didn't look at him while they ordered, and he smiled at people who looked at him too long, and he kept his face arranged in the particular expression that said *I am fine and also competent and also not about to drop this tray* because that was the expression that got tips.

By 9:47, his lower back ached and he smelled like espresso and steamed milk and he had exactly forty minutes to get across the city to campus before his 10:30 lecture started.

He made it with four minutes to spare.

He considered this a victory.

Professor Daine did not consider it a victory.

"Mr. Lane." She said his name the way professors said names when they wanted everyone else in the room to look. "The annotated reading. Due last Tuesday."

"I submitted it digitally, Professor. Thursday evening, 11:58 PM."

A pause. The careful kind.

"The portal closed at 11:55."

Three minutes. He had missed it by three minutes because the café's closing shift had run long because a table of four had decided 9:30 PM was an excellent time to try every item on the menu.

He didn't say any of that.

"I understand," he said. "I'll take the late penalty."

She nodded. Moved on. He sat down and opened his notebook and wrote the date at the top of a clean page with the focused energy of someone who has decided that feeling things is a task for later.

The 1:00 lecture was fine.

The 3:15 lecture was in a building he'd never been to, which turned out to be under renovation, which meant it had relocated to a room he also had never been to, and by the time he found it he was eleven minutes late and the professor did not pause while he found a seat and the only available seat was in the front row directly under the projector which gave everything a faint blue tinge for the next ninety minutes.

After, a classmate stopped him in the hall. Friendly face. Easy smile. Asher had spoken to him twice.

"Hey, Lane. Study group meeting Saturday for the Econ midterm — you in?"

"Yeah," Asher said. "Definitely."

He would not be in. Saturday was a double shift.

He smiled anyway because the alternative was explaining and explaining took energy he didn't currently possess.

By the time his evening shift ended, it was 9:12 PM and his feet had made their opinion on the matter extremely clear. The city was doing that thing it did in September where it couldn't decide between summer and autumn, so it simply offered both at once — warm enough that his jacket felt like too much, cool enough that without it he'd regret it by the time he reached the end of the block.

He chose regret.

He walked.

The apartment could wait. Four walls and a water-stained ceiling could wait. He wasn't ready to be inside yet, in the particular way he sometimes wasn't ready — not tired enough to sleep, too tired to be useful, the day sitting on his chest like something that hadn't finished with him yet.

He found the garden the way he always found it. Not looking for it. Just walking until the noise of the street softened and the iron gate of Elmsworth Garden appeared on his left, open as it always was in the evenings because the city had stopped funding the lock three budget cycles ago.

He went in.

It was quiet here in the way that felt intentional. Old trees. Paths that curved for no practical reason. Benches that had been repainted so many times the wood underneath was almost theoretical. He found his bench — the one near the back wall where the streetlights didn't quite reach — and sat down and let his bag drop to the ground beside him and tipped his head back and breathed.

The sky above the trees was that particular grey-orange of a city night. Never dark. Never stars. Just the permanent distant glow of a place too busy to turn its lights off.

He looked at it anyway.

And then, the way it always happened when he was tired enough to stop managing himself carefully, his mind went somewhere without asking permission.

--------------------

# *F**lashback

-----------------------

*He was nineteen.

*It was the week after he'd lost the warehouse job — the one that had actually paid decently, the one he'd been counting on to cover him through winter. He'd come back from the last shift with his final envelope of cash and sat in the stairwell of his building for twenty minutes before he could make himself go upstairs.*

*He hadn't cried. He didn't, much, by then. But he'd gone to the garden that night because the apartment had felt like the walls were leaning in, and he'd sat on this bench in the dark and just — existed. Barely. In the way you sometimes survive evenings more than live them.*

*He'd heard footsteps and looked up.*

*A figure. Tall — though not as tall as Asher, few people were — dressed entirely in black, a dark hoodie pulled up, and a mask covering the lower half of the face. Not unusual in the city. Plenty of people wore them. But there was something about the way this person moved — unhurried, precise, without the shifty energy of someone who meant harm — that made Asher's instincts stay quiet.*

*The figure had stopped a few feet away.*

*Looked at the bench.*

*Looked at Asher.*

*And then, with a composure that Asher found baffling, simply sat down on the other end of it. Not close. Not intrusive. Just — present. Like a person who had also needed somewhere to be and had chosen here.*

*Asher had watched him for a moment. "You following me?"*

*A pause. Then, muffled slightly by the mask: "No."*

*"You just happened to be here."*

*"Yes."*

*The voice was low. Careful. Like someone who had decided in advance exactly how much they were going to give away and had locked everything else behind it.*

*Asher had looked back at the sky. "Rough night?"*

*Another pause. Longer this time.*

*"Yours looked rougher."*

*Something about the honesty of it — plain, unvarnished, not pretending he hadn't noticed — had made Asher laugh. Quietly. Just a breath, really. But it had moved something loose in his chest that had been stuck there all evening.*

*They'd sat in silence after that. A long time. Long enough that the garden got quieter and the distant sound of traffic settled into something almost like white noise. The figure hadn't asked his name. Hadn't offered one. Hadn't tried to fix anything or say the right thing or fill the quiet with noise the way people did when silence made them uncomfortable.*

*He'd just — stayed.*

*When Asher had finally felt ready to go, he'd stood and picked up his bag. The figure had stood too, same moment, like he'd been waiting for exactly that signal.*

*Asher had looked at him. At the mask. At the dark eyes above it that gave nothing away and somehow gave everything away at the same time.*

*"Same time next disaster?" Asher had said.*

*And the figure had looked at him for a moment — and something in those eyes had shifted, just slightly, warm and private — and then he'd walked away without answering.*

*He'd come back, though.*

*Every time.*

 --------------------

Asher came back to himself slowly. The bench. The grey-orange sky. His bag at his feet. The distant sound of the city doing what cities did.

He pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his sternum, where the memory had settled like pressure, and breathed out slowly.

*Every time,* he thought again.

Every time he had been at the bottom of something — a bad week, a bad month, a night when the silence in his apartment felt less like quiet and more like absence — the figure had appeared. Always the black hoodie. Always the mask. Always the same unhurried way of sitting, of being present without demanding anything in return. Never a name. Never an explanation.

Just — *there.*

And every time, that cologne. Sandalwood. Something darker. Something that by now was so specific and so consistent that Asher had stopped pretending it was coincidence approximately two years ago.

He knew.

He had always known.

He just didn't say it, because saying it would change the shape of the thing, and he wasn't ready for the shape to change. Not yet. Maybe not ever. There was something that functioned like safety in the fiction that this was anonymous — that someone existed in his life whose only purpose seemed to be showing up when he needed it, asking nothing, leaving quietly.

If he named it, it became something else.

So he didn't name it.

He just — knew, quietly, in the part of himself that kept score of things he would never say out loud.

He smelled it before he heard the footsteps.

Sandalwood. Something darker underneath. The specific, expensive, *deeply unfair* scent that had been living in his memory for years.

He didn't turn around immediately. He gave himself three seconds — one, two, three — and in those three seconds he arranged his face into something that was not the expression he'd been wearing a moment ago, which had been the expression of a person quietly dismantling himself in a garden at 9 PM on a Thursday.

Then he turned.

The figure came through the far end of the path the way he always did — unhurried, precise, dressed in a black hoodie with the hood up and a mask covering his face from nose to chin. The streetlight barely reached here. It caught the line of his shoulders, the deliberate way he moved, the hands tucked into the front pocket of the hoodie.

He stopped when he saw Asher looking.

A pause. The familiar kind.

Then he came and sat down. Other end of the bench. Not close. Never close without permission. The way he always did, like a person who understood instinctively where the edges were.

Asher looked back at the sky.

"Rough week," he said. Not a question.

"Mm." The figure's voice, muffled by the mask, low and careful. An acknowledgment without asking for details.

"Got docked for a three-minute late submission," Asher continued, because he wasn't actually talking to get advice or sympathy — he was talking because this was the one place where talking felt like it cost nothing. "Espresso machine tried to end me at 8 AM. Spent eleven minutes looking for a relocated lecture hall." He paused. "Found it."

A quiet sound beside him that might have been amusement. The dark eyes above the mask were watching the trees.

"Successful day," the figure said.

"Incredibly." Asher let out a slow breath. "Found the room, paid half the rent, didn't cry in front of anyone. Setting the bar low and clearing it."

Silence. Comfortable. The specific kind of quiet that Asher had stopped being surprised by, even though it was the rarest thing he knew.

They sat like that for a while. Long enough that the tension in his shoulders — the specific knotted thing that had been building since 6:14 this morning — began, incrementally, to release. Like something that had been held too tightly being carefully, carefully set down.

He didn't understand how that kept working. He'd stopped trying to understand it.

Eventually the figure shifted — the small movement Asher had learned to recognize as *I should go* — and began to stand.

And Asher's hand moved before he decided to move it.

His fingers closed around a wrist.

From behind. Light. Not restraining — just — *there.* The hoodie fabric was soft under his hand. Beneath it, a pulse, steady and then — just for a moment, just briefly — not.

The figure stilled completely.

Asher looked at his own hand like it had done something without consulting him.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

That was all. Just that. Two words, simple and plain, without decoration. He didn't explain what for — the sitting, the quiet, the years of it, all the evenings that had been survivable because of this specific, unnamed presence. He just said it because it was true and he was tired enough tonight that the truth had gotten out before he could stop it.

The wrist under his hand did not move.

The figure did not speak.

But Asher felt it — in the stillness, in the faint change of the air between them, in the way that pulse beneath the fabric did something complicated and unsteady that had nothing to do with coincidence.

He released his grip.

The figure stepped forward. Moved down the path. Hood still up, mask still in place, everything still locked behind that careful composure.

He didn't look back.

He never did.

Asher watched him go.

Then he turned back to the sky and pressed his lips together and did not smile — except that he did, slightly, in the way he never showed anyone, quiet and private and a little helpless about it.

*Same cologne every time,* he thought.

*Same eyes.*

*Same person who thinks I don't know.*

He picked up his bag.

He walked home.

He did not say the name out loud.

But it was there, sitting at the back of his throat, where it always lived.

_______________

## *— Reve's POV —*

---

He walked four blocks before he stopped.

Not because he needed to stop. Not because he was tired or lost or had somewhere to be that required pausing. He stopped because his legs made the decision independently of the rest of him, and Reve Vexley was not accustomed to any part of himself operating without authorization.

He stood on the pavement beside a closed florist shop, hands back in the front pocket of his hoodie, and stared at the middle distance with the focused expression of a man conducting an urgent internal audit.

His wrist.

He could still feel it.

That was the problem. That was the specific, unprecedented, deeply inconvenient problem — that he could still feel the exact pressure of five fingers closing around his wrist, light as something borrowed, and his pulse was still doing what it had done the moment it happened, which was behave in a manner entirely inconsistent with the controlled, carefully maintained version of himself he had spent years constructing.

He breathed out slowly through his nose.

*It was nothing,* he told himself. *A gesture. Courtesy. Asher was tired and it was a human impulse and it meant exactly as much as it looked like it meant and nothing more.*

His pulse disagreed.

He started walking again.

---

The car was where he'd left it — three streets over, dark, unremarkable, one of four vehicles he kept specifically for evenings like this. Evenings when Reve Vexley needed to not be Reve Vexley for a few hours. His driver, Min, was reading something on his phone and looked up without surprise when Reve opened the back door and got in.

Min had worked for him for six years. He had learned, somewhere in the first three months, that there were certain questions you did not ask. Where have you been was one of them. Why are you dressed like that was another. The hoodie and the mask sat on the seat beside Reve now, and Min's eyes moved to them once and then back to the road without comment.

This was why Min had excellent job security.

"Home," Reve said.

The city moved past the windows in streaks of light.

Reve looked at his wrist.

He turned it over once, palm up, studying it the way he studied contracts — looking for the clause that changed everything, the line where the meaning shifted. There was nothing to see, of course. Just his wrist. Just skin and the faint blue trace of a vein underneath.

But the feeling was still there.

He closed his hand and looked out the window instead.

---

The house was quiet in the specific way that expensive places were quiet — not the absence of sound but the presence of stillness, everything arranged and temperature-controlled and lit at precisely the right angle. Floor to ceiling glass on the north wall. The city laid out below like a circuit board, all lit nodes and dark gaps.

Reve poured himself two fingers of water — not whiskey, never when he was already feeling something he hadn't planned to feel — and stood at the window and looked out at it.

Somewhere in that city, Asher Lane was walking home.

He knew the route. He knew the apartment — third floor, east-facing, the window that let in the morning light at an angle that meant Asher was almost certainly awake before his alarm because that was the kind of thing Asher did without realizing, oriented toward light the way certain plants were, instinctively, without effort. He knew the café where Asher worked the morning shift and the evening shift and sometimes both, and he knew about the three-minute late submission because he had been informed of it — not by Asher, never by Asher, but because Reve had arrangements at the university that were thorough in ways that would make certain people uncomfortable if they examined them too closely.

He had not interfered with the late penalty.

He had wanted to. He had picked up his phone and held it for approximately forty seconds, and then he had put it back down, because there was a line — there was always a line — between *present* and *intrusive,* and Asher had never once in his life asked for things to simply be fixed. He solved problems. He cleared his own path. He carried things himself and if you tried to take them from him without permission he would simply pick them back up, politely, and continue.

Reve knew this about him the way he knew most things about Asher — from years of careful, quiet attention. From watching someone exist in the world with a self-sufficiency that was equal parts admirable and — privately, in the part of himself that he didn't examine too closely — something that made his chest do something complicated.

He watched because he needed to know Asher was alright.

He had always needed to know that. Even before he understood why.

---

They had been ten years old when they met.

Reve had been new to the school — mid-year transfer, which meant walking into a classroom where everyone already knew everyone and the social architecture was already complete and he was the variable that didn't fit the equation. He had been fine with this. He had never especially needed to fit.

Asher Lane had been sitting in the back row eating an apple with the focused energy of someone for whom lunch was a project.

He had looked up when Reve came in. Assessed him — quick, direct, no pretense about it — and then moved his bag off the seat beside him without being asked.

That was all. No introduction. No performance of friendliness. Just — *room made.*

Reve had sat down.

They had been inseparable for six years after that.

He didn't think about those six years in sequence very often. They existed in him less as memories and more as something structural — load-bearing, underneath everything, the framework on which a significant portion of who he was had been built. The years before he understood that his father had married his mother for property and not for love. Before his mother's careful, devastating divorce. Before he understood that the world operated on transactions and that warmth was either strategic or naive.

Asher had never been strategic about warmth. He'd given it the way he moved his bag — without calculation, without expecting anything back, because it was simply the obvious thing to do.

Reve had spent the following years becoming a person who knew the price of everything.

He had never stopped knowing what those six years had cost to lose.

---

He left for abroad two weeks after his sixteenth birthday.

His mother had arranged it — the best schools, the right networks, the education befitting someone who was going to inherit and then expand an empire. She had not been wrong. He had absorbed everything they put in front of him with the particular hunger of someone who had decided that competence was the one thing that could never be taken from him.

He had not said a proper goodbye to Asher.

He had meant to. He had a memory of standing outside Asher's building with his school bag over one shoulder, knowing the car was coming in twenty minutes, rehearsing something — some arrangement of words that would carry the weight of six years without collapsing under it. Something that would explain: *I'll come back. I'll find you. This isn't the kind of thing that ends just because distance starts.*

He had stood there for eighteen minutes.

The car had come.

He had gotten in.

He told himself, for a long time after, that it was because he didn't have the words. That was partially true. The fuller truth — the one he'd arrived at slowly, in the years since — was that he'd been sixteen and certain that if he stood in front of Asher and tried to say it, whatever *it* was, his face would do something he couldn't control.

And Reve Vexley had even then been deeply committed to controlling his face.

---

He found out about Asher's parents fourteen months after he left.

Not immediately — the information reached him the way information reached people who were no longer adjacent to a life, filtered and delayed, arriving as a fact rather than an event. *The Lane boy. Parents gone. Seventeen now. Managing.*

He had read those words sitting in a library in Geneva and felt something go very still inside him.

He had called three people in the following hour. Made arrangements through channels that were untraceable back to him. Ensured that certain things — housing, the specific café job that paid slightly above average for no documented reason, a scholarship application that happened to surface at the right moment — were available without appearing to be arranged.

He had gotten on a plane three times in those years under reasons he told his mother were business.

He had stood in various parts of the city and confirmed, with his own eyes, that Asher was still standing.

He was always still standing.

This was, Reve had come to understand, both the most reassuring and the most — *something* — thing about Asher Lane. That he kept going. That he found a way. That he looked at a situation that would have leveled most people and simply incorporated it into his stride.

He was proud of him in a way that had no appropriate outlet.

He kept it to himself, like most things.

---

The mask had been Nadia's idea, technically. He is head of personal security, practical to the point of bluntness, who had observed his third unexplained city excursion in as many months and said, flatly: *If you're going to keep doing this, wear something on your face.*

He had.

It turned out to serve a purpose beyond anonymity. With the mask, with the hood, he was not Reve Vexley — businessman, owner of things, person whose presence generated a specific social atmosphere wherever it landed. He was just — present. Reduced to the essential. Someone who sat beside Asher in the dark and said little and stayed until staying was no longer necessary.

He had discovered, in the process, that he was good at this. At the specific quality of company that didn't require anything. That it was possibly the most honest version of himself he ever managed to be — stripped of the suit and the composure and the carefully maintained surface — just sitting in a garden with someone he—

He stopped that sentence before it finished.

He was very practiced at stopping that sentence.

---

His phone lit up on the counter. Jae, his personal assistant, sending the tomorrow's briefing document at the exact scheduled time because Jae was constitutionally incapable of sending anything late.

Reve looked at it.

He looked at his wrist again.

*Thank you.*

Two words. Plain. Undecorated. Said to the dark in a garden at — he checked — 9:23 PM, by a person who was too tired to perform indifference and too honest, always, underneath everything, to pretend he hadn't noticed.

Asher had noticed.

That was — that was the thought he kept returning to, the one that had stopped his legs four blocks from the garden and was now sitting in the middle of his chest refusing to be filed away neatly.

*Thank you* meant — Asher knew. Not necessarily the *who.* But the *that.* The presence. The consistent, recurring, deliberate presence. He had said thank you not to a stranger who happened to be there but to someone he recognized as having been *there,* specifically, repeatedly, for him.

How long had he known.

Reve stood at the window for a long time.

Below, the city did its indifferent work — light and dark and the constant motion of people who had places to be.

He touched the inside of his wrist once with two fingers.

Then he picked up the briefing document and began to read, because he was Reve Vexley and Reve Vexley did not stand at windows feeling things indefinitely. There was a schedule. There was always a schedule.

But the feeling stayed.

It would stay, he suspected, for considerably longer than was convenient.

It always did, with Asher.

It always had.

---