Seline had arrived on a Tuesday, which was the right day for her, because Seline operated on a kind of low-grade Tuesday energy at all times, unhurried but continuous, the energy of someone who would get to everything eventually and was not worried about it. She had sent a letter two weeks before, and Lira had arranged a free afternoon, and now they were sitting in a tea house three streets east of the palace district eating things that were not appropriate for the morning but that neither of them mentioned because it was afternoon and the morning was over.\n\n\"You look different,\" Seline said.\n\n\"I've been here six weeks,\" Lira said. \"Different happens.\"\n\n\"Different how. Different good or different what have you gotten yourself into.\"\n\nLira considered the range of honest answers. \"Different I'm living in a palace and learning court protocol from a man who counts my rule violations.\"\n\nSeline set down her cup. \"He counts them.\"\n\n\"He said three. Out loud. To my face.\"\n\n\"And you said?\"\n\n\"I asked which order he ranked them in.\"\n\nSeline looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone who had known her for a long time and was updating their running understanding of a situation. \"Tell me about the contract,\" she said.\n\nLira told her about the contract. She was careful and accurate and gave the financial terms and the timeline and the exit clause. She was comprehensive. She gave Seline the information that anyone reasonable would need to understand the situation.\n\nSeline listened with her chin in her hand. \"And the man,\" she said. \"The Crown Prince. Tell me about him.\"\n\n\"I told you about the arrangement,\" Lira said.\n\n\"You told me about the contract. Tell me about the man.\"\n\nShe had prepared for this part. She had prepared for it in the specific way you prepared for things you knew were coming and did not entirely want: she had assembled an accurate and objective account, she had reviewed it, she had determined it gave the right information without giving anything she was not ready to give.\n\nShe gave the accurate and objective account. She mentioned the morning sessions, the precision of his teaching, the way he ran assessments rather than reactions, his tendency to not read documents he was holding.\n\nShe gave all of this, and she watched Seline watch her give it, and when she stopped speaking Seline said nothing for a moment.\n\n\"Tell me something specific,\" Seline said. \"Something small that you noticed.\"\n\nLira paused.\n\nShe thought about the pear tree in the courtyard. She thought about the si tóc that fell when he was tense, the one detail that always escaped his composure. She thought about standing at the window in the late afternoon and the quality of the silence that had existed between them, and the way he had said you didn't have to stay with a voice that was different from his usual voice.\n\nShe thought about what do you actually want and I know what is expected of me and not a bad student and all the small accumulated things she had not known she was storing until Seline asked for one.\n\nShe said: \"He has one strand of hair that comes loose when he's under a lot of stress. It's the only thing that breaks the composure. It happens consistently.\"\n\nSeline looked at her.\n\nThe silence had a particular shape.\n\n\"How many days left?\" Seline said quietly.\n\nLira answered before she thought about it: \"Sixty-one.\"\n\nIt was only when she heard herself say it that she understood she had not needed to calculate it. She had already known it. She had been knowing it continuously, the way you knew the remaining distance in a walk you had been counting all along.\n\nSeline picked up her teacup and looked at the surface of the tea.\n\n\"I'm not falling for him,\" Lira said.\n\nSeline said nothing.\n\n\"I'm noting relevant details,\" Lira said. \"For the purpose of performing the arrangement credibly. That's what I'm doing.\"\n\nSeline set down her teacup. She looked at Lira with the steady, warm, infuriating expression of someone who loved her and was not going to argue with her and also was not going to pretend to agree with her.\n\n\"Okay,\" Seline said.\n\n\"It is okay,\" Lira said. \"Because nothing is happening. It's a transaction. A very specific and time-limited transaction and I know exactly when it ends.\"\n\n\"Sixty-one days,\" Seline said.\n\n\"Sixty-one days,\" Lira confirmed. And heard, in the confirmation, the fact that she had said it the same way both times: immediately, without calculating.\n\nShe looked at her tea. She looked at the window, where the street outside was doing its ordinary afternoon business, people walking in both directions, none of them aware of anything.\n\nShe thought: one strand of hair.\n\nShe thought: I have been counting without knowing I was counting.\n\nShe thought: that is the kind of thing you did with things that mattered. You kept track.\n\nShe looked at Seline. \"Don't,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm not doing anything,\" Seline said. Which was exactly the problem, because the nothing Seline was doing contained multitudes.\n\nThey finished their tea. They walked through the east district and looked at the shop fronts and talked about other things, ordinary things, the wedding of a mutual acquaintance and the price of silk thread and a novel Seline had been reading. Lira was grateful for it. The ordinary things were a container she could use.\n\nThat night she lay in her room and looked at the ceiling and said, out loud, to no one: \"Sixty-one days.\"\n\nThen she closed her eyes.\n\nShe did not sleep immediately. She was aware, in the quiet, of the distance between the east wing where she slept and the part of the palace she did not know precisely but could probably find, and she was aware that she was aware of it, and she was aware that she had begun noticing things she had not noticed in the first week.\n\nShe filed this. She went to sleep. She told herself very firmly that she was going to sleep and she did.\n\n\nShe thought about it for a long time after Seline left, walking home through the autumn streets of Haesol, which were doing their evening things around her: the last market sellers packing up, the lamplighters working their way from the harbor end of the street toward the east quarter, the smell of something being cooked in every building she passed.\n\nShe was thinking about the number sixty-one and what it meant that she had said it immediately, without calculating, and what that kind of immediate knowledge implied about how she had been tracking the days without intending to.\n\nShe had always been good at counting. She had counted things her entire life: money, distances, days until the next move, days in a new place before she felt she had read the room well enough to stop watching so hard. She counted because counting was a way of knowing exactly what you had, and knowing exactly what you had was the basis of every decision she made.\n\nShe had been counting sixty-one without knowing she was counting it. Which meant some part of her had decided it was important enough to track. Which meant something.\n\nShe turned the corner and the harbor came into view at the end of the street, grey and flat and enormous, and she stopped for a moment and looked at it.\n\nShe thought: I do not form attachments.\n\nShe thought: I have been in this city for two years and I have formed an attachment to it. I know which bakery has the good bread and which market seller gives honest weight and which streets flood when the autumn rains come in hard off the sea. I know the rhythms of the supply district and the names of the people at the workshop and the sound the harbor makes at night when the tide is coming in. I have formed an attachment to a place without intending to and without noticing when it happened.\n\nShe thought: that is different from what Seline is implying.\n\nShe thought: Seline is implying a different kind of attachment.\n\nShe thought: I need to be clear about whether Seline is wrong.\n\nShe walked home and made dinner and ate it and washed the dishes and did all the ordinary things in sequence and told herself, firmly and without drama, that she was a person who had excellent control over her own responses and that sixty-one days was a number, just a number, and that knowing a number without calculating it was simply a sign of efficient memory, not of anything else.\n\nShe believed approximately half of this. The half she did not believe sat with her through the evening like company she had not invited but could not bring herself to send away.\n\nShe wrote back to Seline a week after the tea house visit, because Seline's letters deserved responses and because she had been putting it off, which was information.\n\nShe sat at her small desk in the early morning and wrote. She wrote about the palace routines and the court events and Caius, who she was finding herself genuinely fond of, and she wrote about the work she had been doing in the corners of her schedule, the commissions she maintained with the outside world as a reminder that she had a life the arrangement was temporary within.\n\nShe did not write about the counting.\n\nShe did not write about the strand of hair, or the quality of certain silences, or the way she had stopped walking in front of an open door and gone through it instead.\n\nShe wrote: I am navigating it carefully. Which was true, and which contained, inside its truthfulness, the things she was not writing.\n\nSeline would read the things she was not writing. Seline had always been able to read between her sentences, which was one of the reasons she was Seline's friend and not merely Seline's acquaintance: most people she kept to acquaintance level, because acquaintances read what was written and friends read what was not written and the second category required more trust than she usually gave.\n\nShe thought: I have given Seline that trust.\n\nShe thought: Seline has never done anything that made me regret giving it.\n\nShe thought about trust and what it required and whether she had been extending it, in small increments and without fully acknowledging the increments, to someone else.\n\nShe thought: small increments.\n\nShe thought: that is how it happens. Not in a declaration or a decision but in a series of small acts of trusting, small disclosures, small moments of being present without a guard up, until one day you look at the accumulation and realize it has become something with weight.\n\nShe looked at her letter. She looked at what she had written, and at what she had not written, and she added one line at the end: I think I understand now why the clause is in the contract.\n\nShe sealed the letter before she could decide to remove the line.\n\nShe went to the morning briefing with the specific and slightly electrified feeling of someone who has said a true thing they were not sure they were ready to say, and found, as she often found in these situations, that the saying had not made things worse. It had made things more real. Which was its own kind of relief, in the particular way that reality was always a relief over the effort of pretending something was not real.\n\nShe thought: fifty-six days.\n\nShe thought: I am going to be all right.\n\nShe thought: I need to make sure all right means the right things.\n\nShe had a week of ordinary days after the tea house visit with Seline, days that were ordinary in their structure and not ordinary in their content because she was inhabiting them differently now. She was inhabiting them with the knowledge that she was tracking the number sixty-one, which had become fifty-eight by the end of the week, and that the tracking was not an administrative function.\n\nShe went to the morning sessions. She went to the public events. She sat in the anteroom between schedule items and read or worked on her commission or looked at the pear tree, which was so bare now it had become almost abstract, just lines against light, the suggestion of tree rather than the full thing.\n\nShe thought: I like this view.\n\nShe thought: I have grown attached to a view.\n\nShe thought: that is the least complicated of the attachments I have grown.\n\nCaius had noticed something. She was certain of this because Caius was a person who noticed things and who, when he noticed things, arranged circumstances with the specific invisible hand of someone who was helping without announcing that he was helping. The schedule had shifted slightly, in the past week, in a direction that created more shared unstructured time and fewer formal obligations. The anteroom appeared more often in the daily program. She had not requested any of this.\n\nShe thought: he is helping.\n\nShe thought: he has decided this is worth helping.\n\nShe thought about what it meant that Caius had decided this was worth helping. Caius was efficient and observant and aligned with Eran's interests in a way that was genuine rather than political. If Caius was making arrangements, it was because Caius had assessed the situation and concluded that the arrangements were in someone's interest.\n\nShe thought: in whose interest.\n\nShe thought: both parties.\n\nShe found herself almost smiling at her own thought, which was evidence of a change she had not entirely planned for but was not, when she examined it honestly, unwelcome.\n\nShe went to dinner and came back and sat at her window and watched the street and counted, not because she needed to know the number but because the number was something she held now, that had weight and shape, that told her not just how much time was left but how much had already been.\n\nForty-six days.\n\nShe had been here for fifty-four.\n\nShe thought about Seline's question for three days after the tea house visit, turning it over in different lights.\n\nThe question had been: are you being careful. And she had said yes, in her letter, and she had meant it, and she was continuing to mean it. She was being careful. Careful was the correct approach.\n\nBut she was also beginning to understand that careful had different meanings in different contexts, and that careful in this context meant something more specific than careful in the contexts she had used it in before.\n\nIn her previous contexts, careful had meant: do not get attached to things that will not stay. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. Do not stay past the point where leaving is clean.\n\nShe had been careful, by those standards, for her entire adult life.\n\nIn this context, careful meant something different. It meant: be here fully without losing the thread of what you signed. Acknowledge what is real without pretending the timeline is not real. Move through the days with the real thing held alongside the contract thing, both true, neither erasing the other.\n\nShe thought: that is a harder kind of careful.\n\nShe thought: I have not practiced it as much.\n\nShe thought: I am practicing it now.\n\nShe went through the week practicing it. She was attentive and present in the mornings and the events and the anterooom and the small moments in between, and she maintained the thread of the contract alongside all of it, the clean exit in its place, the house in its place, the number of days decreasing by one each morning when she woke.\n\nShe thought: forty-four days.\n\nShe thought: I am getting better at carrying both.\n\nShe thought: getting better at carrying it does not mean it is not heavy.\n\nShe thought: that's all right. I have carried heavy things before. The weight is not the problem. The weight is just the weight.\n\nShe sat by the harbor overlook for another twenty minutes after Seline left the following afternoon, which was not something she had planned to do but which she did anyway. She watched the boats and the water and thought about the number sixty-one and what it contained, what fifty-eight would contain, what forty would contain, and what one would contain, and she thought about the last day, the hundredth day, and what it would feel like to count all the way to it.\n\nShe thought: it will feel like what it is. Like an ending that was always built into the beginning.\n\nShe thought: I know how to meet endings.\n\nShe thought: knowing how to meet them does not mean you stop noticing that they are coming.\n\nShe had been counting for long enough that the counting had become a kind of relationship with the number, the number being sixty-one and then fifty-eight and then forty-four and now forty-one, each one real and specific and carrying its own weight. She had been a person who counted since she was fourteen, since the numbers had been the thing she could rely on when other things were not reliable, since she had learned that numbers told the truth whether or not people did.\n\nThe number now was forty-one, and it was telling her the truth, which was that forty-one was fewer than sixty-one had been and fewer than fifty-eight and that the direction of travel was fixed and the destination was fixed and what happened between now and the destination was what she was here for.\n\nShe thought: I am here for forty-one more days of something real.\n\nShe thought: forty-one days of real is a quantity worth having. Worth having fully, not partially, not reserved, not already preparing for the end of it.\n\nShe thought: I know how to be in things. I have always known how to be in things fully. I stopped being willing to be in this one fully at some point, out of caution, and caution is useful but caution is not the whole of what I am.\n\nShe went to sleep with forty-one days in her head and the intention of being in all of them, and the morning came and she began.