Selena's laugh was wet, indistinguishable from rain on her face. "He used to do that as a child. Mother hated it. Said it sounded like cats dying. But he never stopped, not even when she—" She broke off, the past too large for this moment. "He must have trusted you tremendously. To let you hear that."
"I think he trusted me before I trusted myself," Eli admitted. "That's what made the affairs so—" He caught himself, the confession emerging unplanned. "There were others, Selena. In the last year before the explosion. Not many, not meaningful, but enough. I was trying to understand if I was still capable of wanting, of initiating, of being someone who chose rather than someone who responded to being chosen."
"Did he know?"
