Death After Death 189-191

Ch. 189 - Shifting Paths

Simon woke up in bed, in a dark room. At first, he feared he’d returned to the cabin, but when he didn’t feel the familiar lumps in that straw mattress, he calmed down. Well, woke was perhaps not the right word. His dreams tore at him violently, and he would have sworn that he’d woken up and fallen asleep for a week's worth of nights, but when he asked the gray-robed priestess about it, she said he was brought back only a few hours ago.

His clothes and other things had been folded and stacked neatly beside him in the dim room. Part of him felt like what had happened last night was just a dream, but he knew that it wasn’t. Even without the headache, he would have known that. 

Food was brought to him evenings and mornings by Diara, and when he asked her how long he was supposed to stay there, she just smiled patiently before explaining, “Seeing through the mists of time can be very hard on even the most prepared.”

“But I didn’t look through time,” he insisted. “I just had… strange dreams.”

“That is what they all say,” she agreed, “But if such things were easy, then they would not be valuable.”

Simon meditated on her words and on those dreams. He even explained as much as he could remember to his mirror. Still, it was two days before he rose once more. 

When he emerged from his room armed and armored, she asked, “Will you be leaving already?”

“That depends,” Simon answered with a smile, “Is there any chance I could get a tour of the city before I go?” Even before she opened her mouth, he knew the answer was going to be no, but some part of him had to ask.

“You could,” she said, “If that is what the mists showed you, but our city… it’s not a place people come back from. Those who stay must stay forever.”

“Oh?” he asked, somewhat surprised by her answer. “I thought it was just for the priests and priestesses and the like.”

“It’s for that too,” she agreed, “But we do not leave the mountain either, so that distinction hardly matters. Did your visions tell you that you should stay?”

He shook his head. Maybe they told me I should take one more bath with you, he told himself, but he didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, he thanked her for her time and hospitality, and then, with one last look at the stunning caldera city, he started traveling down the mountain. 

Just as he’d suspected when he’d first seen the narrow trail, it was a dozen times easier to traverse than the trail he’d blazed. It had taken him over a week to climb up the mountain, but he was only forced to sleep a single night under an overhang on the way down, and the weather slowly got warmer approached the ground. 

The trail was never wide, and sometimes it was damaged by beast men activity or landslides. It was never perfect, but it was a thousand times better than sheer cliff faces and gravel-strewn slopes. 

Most of the way, his view was obscured by the same clouds that had plagued him on the way up the mountain. There were occasions where he got glimpses of the wider landscape, though, and they were enough to make him understand Diara’s fascination with the sea. Even in those foggy glimpses, it appeared endless from here, and save for the occasional island, it probably was. 

“I could get enough money together to buy a ship and outfit properly,” he told himself. “There’s a whole world out there just waiting to be explored.”

While his fume-powered visions had given him some hint of what lay out there, those could in no way be trusted. Still, he longed to test them, if only to understand everything else he saw that much better.  

The way down ended not so far from where he started, near the monastery that he’d spent the night at, making him feel stupid. He’d read their interest in his destination as protectiveness of it, but in reality, if he’d simply confessed where he was going, they probably would have sent him here. 

“Well, they would have tested me and sent me here if they’d found me worthy,” Simon decided. “If they’d found me unworthy, they still probably would have killed me.”

After a couple days of reflection, Simon felt like he had a wider view of what it was he was doing. He felt like he could see the outlines of all of this in broad strokes, even if he had trouble putting it into words. Even without that, though, this would have been worth it, iif only for the beauty of the trip, and he made several sketches that he wanted to try to turn into proper paintings one day when he had the time and the skill.

Once he reached Thebian again, though, he had some hard choices to make. He had years to waste yet, and he no longer knew what he should do with them. He’d planned to solve a curse for Elthena as a sort of wedding present, but he had found no real evidence that it existed. Indeed, now that he’d seen the Oracle, he wouldn’t be surprised to know that the whole thing had been made up by her Grandfather after he’d come down that mountain or been rewritten by someone after the fact. None of that helped him. 

“I suppose I could just make up a new prophecy and try to spread it around,” he told himself while walking through the market the day he arrived, as he tried to put all of this together. “Some theatrics here… maybe an ancient carved tablet there… I could probably make it happen.”

Still, it seemed like an awful lot of hassle just to get back together with a woman, and he wasn’t sure making up a new religion for the region just to make things work with her was the right idea. So, undecided, he continued further down the coast. This time, he was on foot, though he was tempted to get another mule just for old time's sake. 

Bandits accosted him once, a week north of Ionar, but they scattered when he took the hand of their leader in a duel. The man screamed bloody murder, even as Simon helped him tie off the stump with a leather thong. “Losing a hand is an appropriate punishment for theft,” he said, unperturbed when the man asked him why he didn’t kill him outright. “But murder would not be.”

The man seemed confused by that, but he was even more confused by what Simon said next. “The sad part is I could reattach your hand, but you’d just keep using it to make the world even worse than it already is.”

“It is no crime to steal when you are hungry,” the man shot back, basically agreeing with Simon. He used a word of lesser healing to stop the bleeding and ease the pain for that honesty at least. 

“If you must steal, then steal from those who have stolen from others, or else from the sea, not your fellow man,” he said, rising and continuing on to leave the maimed bandit to his fate. 

He took his time walking down the coast to consider what it was he wanted to do. He’d already done medicine and research. Art might be fun, but then again, fighting the Viscount had been a wonderful time. On some level, the idea of leading an armed insurrection appealed to him the most. Being a rebel was fun. Hell, even running Crowvar until he’d been assassinated had been enjoyable. He was pretty sure that he could have made that whole area better with a few more years of work.

In the end, Simon took up the hammer again, in the little village of Olven’s Narrows, which was close enough to Ionar that he could see the volcano and ships leaving the port. This wasn’t by choice so much as happenstance. He was walking through the half-abandoned place when he saw a dozen men crowded around a blacksmith's shop that had seen better days. 

He decided to take a look and quickly found the problem. A medium-sized merchant ship had damaged their rudder just enough that they were unlikely to make it past the rocks into Ionar’s harbor, but the village blacksmith had died years before, so they were trying and failing to do it themselves. 

Simon watched the sailors take turns trying to hammer the brass fitting into shape, making it worse and worse until it finally cracked. Eventually, he volunteered to do it himself. 

“You?” one man laughed. “Look at those soft hands. Are you an artist? A scholar?”

“I’m no blacksmith,” Simon agreed, causing a wave of laughter, “Not usually. But I spent years at the forge in my youth, which is probably more than all you lot put together, isn’t it?”

“What’s your price then?” the merchant asked testily. “The red wine I carry from the north is in no hurry, but some of my other goods are perishable, and I aim to be on my way!”

“For me? Nothing,” Simon answered with a shrug. “But for the people of this little town, how about you throw a proper feast. Food, drink, the works. You know, as gratitude for their assistance to you in their time of need.”

“A feast?” he asked, “growing red in the face, but that could cost a fortune with what I'm carrying.”

Simon shrugged, setting the two halves of the broken rudder strap back down. “That’s fine. Good luck on the remainder of your voyage.”

“But… I’ll pay you in gold!” the portly man said. “We can work this out!”

“I already have gold,” Simon answered, jingling his own purse. “And a strong sword arm to go with it. I was just going to do this out of the goodness in my heart, but I can see you have no goodness in yours.”

Simon only got a dozen steps away before the man caved, and a cheer went up among the sailors. Simon let them go to their tasks while he got the ramshackle forge back in some kind of order. Then, after he fetched some driftwood, he got to work. 

The villagers came up to him, wondering what he was doing, but Simon just smiled. “Just getting you guys a good dinner out of the deal. There's nothing wrong with that, right?”

No one harassed him after that, and it took only a few hours to rework the metal into the shape it needed to be and repair the crack. He didn’t deliver the work until the evening when the pig was roasting, and the wine was flowing, though. He even rowed out to the ship with the quartermaster, reattached it, and restrung the steering ropes while everyone else celebrated. 

Afterward, he joined them but didn’t get drunk. After he’d flashed his own wealth to make a point, that would have been more than stupid. Instead, he socialized with the locals and the sailors and learned a little more about what was going on in the area. Given that another version of him was currently living in Ionar right now as a healer, though, none of it was a surprise to him. 

In the morning the little ship was gone, but Simon stayed behind, and no one gave him any trouble about setting up in the old smithy if that was indeed what he intended to do. 

Ch. 190 - A Little Like Home

This time his first order of business, even before he built a place to stay was to establish an alias. Though the Oracle had mentioned it casually, there were indeed a lot of Simons in the world lately, and all of them were him, at some point in time. Right now, there was an herbalist in Ionar named Simon, and the last thing he wanted someone to do was make that association.

So, he went around the village, introducing himself as Ennis instead. It was only once that was done that he started the hard work of getting a roof over his head and a bed underneath him. That took a few days and started out as a lean-too. Once he’d made it clear he was setting up shop, he went into the city to the lower market, which the past version of himself used, and he bought the mule he’d been craving, along with a few tools he was missing and a stout axe. 

The axe was for timbers, which he would need if he wanted to build something that resembled an actual shop again instead of just a forge. He made two trips into the mountains for two-inch thick pines that were the right size. Simon chose the straightest ones he could find. Then, he delimbed and debarked them before he brought them back to continue his progress. 

After that, his trips into the mountains were for something entirely different: coal. He’d discovered several small seams of the stuff on his previous explorations in the area, and it wasn’t hard to find one of them again. 

The people of Ionia largely seemed to frown on the stuff for reasons that were as much related to the smell and to superstitions about how rocks shouldn’t burn, but Simon didn’t care about that. He just knew that hauling a ton of coal would get him a lot more bang for his buck than a ton of waterlogged driftwood, and he was all in favor of that. 

It took months to set things up to a level where he was happy with them. Even then, it still wasn't as nice as his long-lost cabin, but that was fine. He was in no hurry, and the customers in this out-of-the-way place were few and far between. Sometimes, he might mend a chain or shoe a horse, but mostly, his days were his own to do whatever he wanted with, and he spent much of that time sketching, though occasionally, after everyone went to bed, he would do some magical experimentation. 

Most of his art projects involved charcoal and a whitewashed wall that he would scrub after each attempt as he erased the face he had worked so hard to create. Paper was expensive, after all. The experience was ephemeral, but then, that was the point. He wasn’t trying to paint something that would hang in a gallery. He was trying to replicate the tiny features and imperfections that made someone seem like a real person rather than a plastic surgery victim or a cartoon character. 

That was the only way he’d ever be able to use magic to disguise himself, and that was an ability he badly wanted. As much as part of him liked the idea of every city he saved having a different statue of him, he was fairly sure that people like the Unspoken would put that together eventually, complicating future levels.  

“I’ll also need it if I want to go for a seamless transition between old me and new me,” he said aloud as he sketched. “Though, I’m not sure that’s the best approach.”

Up until now, he’d been pretty honest with Elthena, and he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to lie to her like that, pretending that the old Simon had just slipped through her grip and come right back to the palace. He didn’t even have teleportation magic yet. He was working on it, though.

He’d tried two experiments with words of distance. In one case, he’d used Dnarth Celdura, and in the other, he’d used Dnarth Zyvon. But neither had gone as intended. In the former case, the rock he’d tried to teleport from one spot on the beach to another a few feet away had seen the thing disappear, never to return, and in the other, the thing had simply exploded, piercing his arm with shrapnel in several places. 

He planned to do more experiments on the subject, but those would have to wait for inspiration to strike. There were always other projects he could work on. 

One that he had given a lot of thought to but not actually done yet was to try using his least favorite word in a slightly more positive way. Zyvon was dangerous, but more than that, it was addictive. Simon was hopeful that if he channeled a lesser word of transfer through something else, though, like a blade, it might mute those effects. If he wanted to live a long life that involved any magic at all, then he was going to have to find a way to balance between the amount of energy he harvested and the amount of energy he burned.

Still, something stopped him there, and the only move he made toward it was to get better at making blades since that was never a strong point of his. Even after years in the dark forges of the unspoken, he was always better at getting the runic inscriptions on the finished weapons than he was at making them. 

Still, as his reputation grew, he started to get more customers, and people visited him rather than making the trip all the way down the coast to the city. It was about that time that the volcano finally erupted. 

Simon had hoped to learn to teleport before that happened so that he could go watch himself battle the lava beast, but that was not to be. Instead, he stood on the sand with everyone else while they wondered what was going to happen. Some argued that they should flee immediately. That they should take their fishing boats and get as far away as possible. 

Normally, Simon would have agreed with such sensible advice, but this time, he stayed where he was and told everyone, “It’s likely just a small eruption. It will be no more than that. You’ll see.”

From where they were, that was all it looked like, but Simon’s memories helped him remember more than anyone else could make out. He saw the lava spill over the near side of the rim to save the town, and after that, he saw a slow tendril of it rise up that he knew must have been that awful lava titan, even if it didn’t look like anything from here.

Still, he knew. Even while everyone else talked and pointed excitedly, he remembered what it was like to make that long fall to the ground. It was worse than he thought it would be, and truthfully, it was more than a little traumatic to relive all that. He kept thinking about the evil version of himself he’d encountered, and the fight that had left him basically crippled. Both of them were impossible images to get out of his mind. After the eruption fizzled out half an hour later, he went and got drunk for the first time in a long time on the cheap white wine that was so common in the region. 

The following day, after he’d used a lesser word of cure to eliminate his hangover, he finally announced that he would take on an apprentice. This was something that he’d been asked about more than once during the last few months, but it was always something that he pushed away because he had no need for an extra set of hands. 

Now, though, he had a need. He was on a timer. A few years from now, he would leave this village, and he decided that it would be wrong to leave them empty-handed. Fortunately, there was no shortage of applicants. Almost every boy in Olven’s Narrows wanted to do something besides be a fisherman. 

He gave each of them a brief interview, both to find out what they knew and why they wanted to do this work. Most answered with some version of “I want to learn a skill so that I can leave this tiny nowhere place and go somewhere important like Ionar.”

All of those boys ruled themselves out immediately, without knowing it, but even after that, there were still a few contenders. Simon eventually went with a boy named Niko, who was a good choice both because of his powerful build and because he wanted to learn a skill so that he could provide for his widowed mother. Both of those were excellent reasons to take the time to teach him how hot the fires needed to be and the skills he’d need to be successful. Truthfully, he probably didn’t have enough time to teach the kid everything he needed to know. In three to five years, he planned to move to the city to be ready for his eventual exile, but that would still be enough to give the kid the basics. 

He also added swordplay to the kid’s curriculum, just because, it was always a good skill to have. This close to Ionar, there was never likely to be any trouble, but even so, the strong needed to protect the weak, and he had no doubt that a few years swinging a hammer would turn Niko into the strongest young man for miles around. 

Most of the time, he helped Simon with other smaller things, like going into the upper hills of the Raiden Mountains to fetch more coal. Other times, when Simon didn’t have a job for the boy to watch or help with, he would send him off to fish for their supper while he sketched or planned. 

The most welcome part of this life so far was that he’d entirely gotten over his aversion to seafood. It had been so long since he’d had it that he’d actually missed it, and once he got his hands on salt and citrus fruits, he was able to make some amazing things in his tiny, barely functional kitchen. 

It was at dinner time that Niko would ask him the most questions. Those started off with questions about Blacksmithing but usually ended up with some story about one of Simon's adventures or some physical principle that was largely unknown to even the educated of this world. He taught the boy bits about herbalism, and eventually, he even taught him to read, though Niko showed zero interest in it. 

“Why should I read a book when I can just ask you?” he laughed. “You know everything, and I don’t even know how you do it!”

“There’s lots of things I have yet to learn and some things I have already forgotten,” Simon admitted. “No one can know everything. I don’t know how to mend a net or fish with one. I don’t know how to build with stone or even how to paint.”

“Your drawings are very good,” the boy insisted. “You could paint if you wanted to. I think you just like drawing in the soot too much.”

That at least made Simon smile. He’d grown to love the ease of his medium. Though he would have preferred to use paper, the way he could blend charcoal together really had become a form of painting to him. That was what allowed him to get past the lines he’d been hung up on for so long and into the shapes and values of images. 

He hadn’t yet tried to remake his face in disguise, but he planned to when he left the city, though he hoped to find a leaper or a cripple to practice on first. It would be a fair trade. He’d find someone to fix, and in the process, he would be sure he wasn’t about to turn himself into a hideous freak. Everyone would win.

Ch. 191 - Crossover Episode

While the volcanic eruption made it pretty easy to know where he was in the timeline, Simon was surprised how quickly things got back to normal. People still talked about it in the days and weeks after it had happened, and there was a resurgence of interest after that when there were whispers that a brave hero had died fighting a terrible stone giant. 

After that, though, things calmed down surprisingly quickly. Life, it would seem, went on, as long as the world was in no immediate danger of ending. That surprised Simon a little bit, but he supposed that he’d seen similar things happen in the aftermath of Schwarzenbruck’s zombie apocalypse. 

After that, keeping track of the slow sequence of events that made up his past life wasn’t hard, not even a day's ride from the city. The rumors about what had really happened the night the volcano had erupted came and went whenever a new trade ship would dock for a night or two. However, more and more, those stories were eclipsed by a new one: the Queen of Ionia had taken a consort. If rumors were to be believed, he was an ugly foreigner, but most doubted that could possibly be the case for someone as radiant and dignified as the queen. 

Sometime after that, Simon started making monthly trips to the city just to try to catch a glimpse of himself. He even used stealth and a little magic to climb the palace walls a few times and just watched his own recovery. It was an interesting sensation, and he wondered what would happen if he took out the past version of himself. 

That would be a paradox, for sure, his brain told him. He believed it mostly, too, but with magic in play, he honestly had no idea.  I’m not him, right? I mean, he was me, but he died, and I’m me now, so if he ceased to exist, nothing about me would change, but the future of this level certainly would…

He obviously had no intention of killing himself, but as a thought experiment, it crept into his mind again and again when he observed himself in the garden or the library as past Simon made his slow recovery. It was only when he saw himself with Elthena that those positive memories pushed aside his darker thoughts. 

Still, all of that came to an end when the war started. Simon knew that little would come of it beyond the spread of disease, but during that time, the normally lax atmosphere around the palace transformed, and sneaking in without killing one or two people became effectively impossible. 

“Past me would probably notice if future me started dropping bodies,” he told himself one day as he walked back to Olven’s Narrows with his mule, which was heavily loaded with the various supplies he’d purchased on this trip. “But would that cause a paradox? How much can I change the circumstances of past me before future me ceases to exist, if it even really works like that? What do you think, Daisy Two.”

The mule, of course, had no answers. Really, he should probably do an experiment to figure this out, but he had no idea how to do something like that without causing catastrophic consequences if he was wrong. “Do I bring someone else through a portal with me, solve a level, and then kill them in the past to see how that ripples out through the future?”

As the plague started to sweep across the region, he thought about this more and more, as well as the idea that some other version of himself might be watching him, even as he watched himself now. Really, though, all of those thoughts were just to keep himself from worrying about his impending reunion with Elthena. 

It was something that he’d yearned for, for decades now, and day by day, it was getting closer. Of course, that also meant that his time in his sleepy little village was coming to an end, which was sad in its own way. 

Simon had worked hard to make sure that no one died as the plague swept through it. It had a wise woman, of course, who was good with herbs, but under her treatments, a few older people had almost passed away. They would have, if not for a few surreptitious words of lesser curing he’d used to help them get through the worst of it.  

That happened less often as he taught her some better ways to do things. “A blacksmith teaching me how to do my job,” she complained in an amiable enough way on more than one occasion. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

“Blacksmithing is just for fun,” he assured her. “Before I came here, I was a scholar. Everywhere I go, I just learn from people smarter than me.”

“Then I’ll be sure to teach you a few things before you continue on,” she responded. 

Simon smiled at that. She had nothing to teach him, but he suspected she could see the auras he could not because of the way she acted around certain strangers. So, the mere fact that she didn’t bristle at him was a welcome victory of a sort. 

The only person that Simon would miss in all of this was Niko. He was growing up to be a fine young man, and the fact that he’d practically run the blacksmith shop while Simon had tended to the sick had been a good sign for the things ahead. 

So, it was especially heartbreaking when he told the boy that he would probably be moving on soon, and Niko reacted so poorly. “But why?” the boy had practically wailed. “Are you unhappy here? Did I do something wrong?”

“It's not about that,” Simon said. “I love it here, but soon it will be time for me to move on. I’ve—”

“I’ll go with you Master Ennis!” Niko volunteered immediately. 

They both knew that was impossible, of course. He had his mother to think of, but even as Simon worked through those messy emotions, he realized that he’d come to look on the boy as a son more than an apprentice after the years Simon had spent training him. It hurt him more than he would have thought to discover that, even as he tried to cut the only bond he’d had like this since his time with Gregor so long ago.

“I’ll be in Ionar for a while at least before I leave the region,” Simon promised his apprentice, “So It’s not like I’ll just disappear. I’ll still visit now and then, and just think you’ll finally have all of this to yourself, just like we talked about.”

“I’d rather work for you, even if I make less money,” the boy sighed. 

The conversation wasn’t finished that night, or even that week, but eventually, the boy grudgingly accepted the reality of the situation. Things weren’t the same between them after that, but despite the increased distance, Niko still hugged Simon when he finally went to leave the following week. 

“Thank you,” he whispered. “For everything.”

Simon smiled at that but kept the tears in his eyes until he was well down the beach. He left the boy pretty much everything. The only things he’d taken when him were a few blades, his armor, and a backpack full of his most important possessions.

He'd never actually gotten around to making a magic blade, like the vampiric sword he’d designed, but he probably wouldn't need one anyway. Everything else, including most of his ready cash, he’d left to the boy. He wouldn’t need more than money for a room with a view of the harbor for a few weeks, after all. 

Simon's days in Ionar this time were characterized by anxiousness more than anything. He kept trying to tell himself that he should be happier, but with everything that had happened and everything that might yet happen, that was harder. 

His mind just kept going in circles about two twin mysteries: time and relationships. How can I live my strange life without screwing everything up for me and the ones I love? He asked himself. 

He didn’t have an answer. Instead, all he could do to distract himself was sketch pictures of ships coming into the harbor while he waited for one specific ship to indicate that Elthena was about to send him off and out of her life forever. The place he’d picked to keep a look out for that, at least, was beautiful. Ionar was a shining work of art as much as it was a place, and from where he was staying in the upper city, he could see the lower city, the beautiful harbor, and the steady parade of trade that was the place’s lifeblood as it came and went. 

In that time, he experimented with small magical alterations to his features. He gave himself the touch of gray that his doppelgänger had, and he toyed with a few of the more visible scars he could remember with the words of lesser flesh shaping. It worked better than he expected. Honestly, they looked pretty similar, at least as far as his memory went, but in the end, he decided to remove them.

“I’m not going to lie to her,” he told himself. “Not about this or about anything else. That’s not how we fix this.”

Nearly a month after he arrived in town, he saw a familiar ship docked near the breakwater. He hadn’t seen the Belaphora in a long time, but he recognized her instantly, even from this distance, so high above the harbor. There was just something about a ship you’d spent time on that made it stand out from all the other boats docked around it. 

From that point on, Simon was up before dawn every morning, watching and waiting to see if this was the night that he was sent away. For four days and nights, his vigil went unrewarded, but on the fifth, he noted a man wrapped in a carpet being bundled off to the lower city on the back of his own donkey. It was an interesting scene, and when he looked up, he saw a teary-eyed queen standing on her balcony on the third floor, watching as he was led away. 

“Daisy, how could you do me like this?” he whispered to himself, using the gallows humor to shield himself from the darker emotions that seeing Elthena like that inspired. 

As soon as the sailors were out of the gate and heading down the main avenue, Simon took advantage of the dim light to vault the wall in an area that he already knew wasn’t well guarded. From there, he stole quickly and quietly along the deserted pre-dawn hallways as he made his way to the queen’s chambers. 

Once, he almost ran into a servant on a blind corner, but the maid apologized and bowed. “I’m so sorry, mister Simon, sir,” she apologized, but he waved her off. 

“Think nothing of it,” he said as he moved past her. For a moment, he felt supremely lucky, but a few seconds later, he realized that all of these people were used to seeing him around the palace every day, and the news would not yet have gotten out that he’d been exiled. 

Simon spent a moment wondering what he might be able to do with that information, but he didn’t figure anything out by the time he slipped into the queen’s chambers. She was still standing on her balcony and didn’t come back in for a long time. He wondered if she planned to wait until he descended the winding cliffside road to the lower city, but she stayed out even longer than that. 

She waited until the sun was up and the ship had actually left port before she came in. It was a gesture he found more than a little touching. In that time, servants came in twice, bringing her breakfast the first time and a message the second time. 

As he stood there behind the bed curtains, waiting for her servants to leave, he could feel his heart beating harder in anticipation. He’d imagined this moment a thousand times, and even though it was going just as well as he could have hoped, he was still incredibly nervous.

“Guess who?” he asked in a gentle tone, trying not to startle her too badly.

He needn’t have worried. The woman barely reacted at all.

“Of course, it’s you, Simon. Who else would it be? I thought you would do something like this,” she sighed, not bothering to turn around and look at him. “Sit down, Simon. Let’s talk.”