Leo made a schedule.

This was, he recognized, extremely Scarlett of him, and he felt a complicated fondness about that as he sat at his kitchen table the evening before the festival with a piece of paper and a pen, working out the logistics. The festival ran from four in the afternoon to ten at night - six hours, which divided, cleanly enough, into four slots of approximately ninety minutes each, with small buffers between them for travel and transition and the general human friction of moving between one thing and the next.

Four to five-thirty: Scarlett. Five-thirty to seven: Aria. Seven to eight-thirty: Chloe. Eight-thirty to ten: Veronica.

He looked at the schedule. The schedule looked back at him.

It was, he thought, the fairest solution. He'd thought about it from every angle he could manage, turned it over in his mind for a day and a half, and this kept coming out as the answer: he couldn't choose, not because he didn't care but because he cared genuinely about all of them, and genuinely couldn't in good conscience pretend he didn't. Choosing one and telling the others thanks, but no would require him to reduce three real connections to nothing, and that felt both dishonest and unkind, two things he was constitutionally opposed to being. Saying no to all four would be worse - it would be refusing something real and good because he was afraid of it, and he'd done enough refusing of real and good things in his life.

So: four slots. Ninety minutes each. Full presence, full attention, no phone, no distraction - each one a complete and genuine thing, not a fraction of something divided but a whole thing in itself. It was, he felt, not a bad plan.

He was aware, in the way you are aware of a wobble in a structure you've decided to trust anyway, that it had a fault. The fault was that he hadn't told any of them. Each of them thought she was coming to the festival with him, and technically she was - he just hadn't mentioned that the others were also coming to the festival with him, in adjacent time slots. This was, he acknowledged to the piece of paper, not entirely transparent. But he'd thought about being transparent, about sending four careful messages explaining the arrangement, and every version of that conversation ended with hurt feelings and nobody going to the festival with anyone, which seemed worse, and so he'd decided to simply ensure the slots didn't overlap and trust that the evening would take care of itself.

The evening was not, as it happened, going to take care of itself. But Leo was an optimist, in the specific way of a person who has had to find something to be, and he capped his pen and folded the schedule and told himself it would be fine.

The morning of the festival he woke early and cooked, because cooking was how he thought, and moved around the kitchen in the early light turning over the day ahead with the low hum of nervous anticipation that was new to him. He was nervous. He didn't usually get nervous before social events - or rather, he got anxious about being noticed and overwhelmed, which was different - but this was a different kind of nervous, warmer and less defended, the feeling of someone who has admitted to wanting something and is now required to go toward it.

He thought about each of them while he cooked.

Scarlett, who had written just her name at the bottom of a note. Scarlett who kept a pen she'd never put back and had learned, slowly, painfully, one evening at a time, to let herself be tired in front of him. He thought about the Council office, and the boxes, and the warm small moment of dinner she hadn't asked for, and felt something in his chest that was specific and quiet and had been there, he understood, for considerably longer than he'd admitted.

Aria, who had studied the middle distance and said not a luck thing this time. Aria with her arms at the finish line, running toward something instead of away. Aria who had been the first one around the corner in the dark, out of pure protective love so uncomplicated it had hit him like a clean wind. He thought about the nurse's office, and the bandage, and the way she'd gone still when he asked does it hurt like it was a real question, and felt the thing in his chest again, slightly differently shaped.

Chloe, whose hands had not been quite steady, who had said just me asking as though it had taken everything she had. Chloe who had made a machine to understand something the machine was never going to tell her, and had, at the end, put the machine on a shelf and shown up anyway. He thought about the library, about scattered information and the way she'd looked at him when he'd turned her own physics back to her, and the thing in his chest felt like it did when you recognize something you'd forgotten you knew.

And Veronica. I'm trying, she'd said, in a voice that was learning. He thought about dirt under her nails, about the seedlings she'd grown with her own clumsy hands, about a girl who had arrived at this school with a plan to buy a husband and had ended up kneeling in a school garden learning how to tend things for no reason, and felt the specific bewildered tenderness of watching someone become who they actually were.

He loved them, he thought, quite suddenly, standing at his kitchen counter with a spatula in his hand.

Not the same way - they were four very different people and the feelings were four very different shapes - but the word fit for all of them, in the broad honest sense of it: he loved them. He had, apparently, without quite noticing, grown to love four people who had each decided he was worth knowing, and who had each, in their own way, let him know them in return. And he didn't know how you were supposed to hold that, what you were supposed to do when your heart had organized itself around four distinct people simultaneously, whether it was possible to feel this much in four directions without anything breaking.

He didn't have an answer. He had a schedule, a clean kitchen, and four people who were each, right now, somewhere in the city, getting ready for an evening they each believed was theirs.

The guilt moved through him, then, quiet and real - because he had thought of the plan as fair, as giving each of them a whole thing rather than a fraction, and that was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was that it was also easier. Easier than choosing, easier than the conversation he didn't know how to have, easier than sitting still with the love in his chest and working out what to do with it. He was, he admitted to the spatula, doing the thing he always did: making everyone comfortable at the expense of doing the harder, more honest thing. He was taking care of the situation the way he took care of everything - smoothly, so nobody had to be uncomfortable - and he was calling it fairness when part of it, the uncomfortable part, was fear.

Fear of choosing and being wrong. Fear of hurting someone. Fear, perhaps most of all, of wanting something so clearly and having it matter so much and being asked to risk it on a single decision in a world where he still sometimes couldn't believe he was worth deciding toward at all.

He served his breakfast, sat down, and ate.

And then, because he was Leo, he picked up the schedule and checked it one more time, adjusted the start time of the second slot by five minutes, and committed. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. He would show up - all of him, fully - for each of them, one at a time, and he would let the evening be what it was going to be, and he would deal with the rest when it arrived.

He put on his best shirt. Checked the mirror. Decided he looked like himself, which was the best he could do.

And went to meet Scarlett.

She was waiting at the gate of the festival grounds, and when he saw her his heart did the specific small lurch it had been doing around her for weeks, which he noted without surprise. She was wearing a summer dress - pale, simple, nothing to do with armor or procedure - and her hair was down, which he didn't think he'd ever seen, and she looked like exactly who she was when she wasn't performing anything, which was a girl with sharp eyes and a softer face than her reputation, and she was clearly doing the thing where she composed herself by standing very still.

"Hi," Leo said, arriving in front of her, and smiled.

Scarlett looked at him, and the composure flickered, and she said, with a small and genuine and slightly helpless warmth that was worth every folder she'd ever organized: "Hi."

And the festival opened around them in lights and warmth and the smell of summer food, and Leo thought: ninety minutes. Make it real. Give her the whole thing.

He did not think about the schedule in his pocket, or about what would happen at five-thirty, or about the four separate hopes converging, across the city, on a single evening.

For now there was only this: the lights, and the warmth, and the girl whose hair was down for the first time, and the summer beginning.

It was, for ninety minutes, the loveliest thing in the world.

And underneath it, quiet and patient as a timer, the rest of it waited.