Jacob was about to turn back towards the apartment when he got a call. Tarim. Audio only.

“What’s up, kid?” Jacob asked, glad for an excuse to dawdle a bit longer.

“You knew this was going to happen, right?” That was all he said before he hung up.

Impeccable timing.

Jacob called Bob to ask for Grim’s address, then went over there—an apartment on the first floor of another grubby tenement building in the Earther quarter. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He pounded harder, but still nothing.

“Kid, you in there?” Jacob shouted through the crack.

“Go away!” came Tarim’s voice from inside.

“It went that bad, huh?”

“Fuck off.”

“Open up, retard. You know how easy it would be for me to bust this door down? If you don’t open it in the next five seconds, I’ll have you pay for it.”

After a few seconds there was a sound of the lock turning, and Jacob opened the door. Tarim stood against a wall in the hallway, arms crossed, and refused to meet his eye.

“Go ahead and gloat,” he muttered.

“Let me guess. You gave Clara the money.”

“Yep.”

“She ran off with it.”

“Yep. And some other stuff. Just say ‘I told you so’.”

“I told you so.” Jacob pulled the door shut behind him and approached the boy. “What did we learn?”

Tarim sank down to the floor, chin resting on his knees. “That no one would ever love someone like me.”

“What a depressing thing to say. No, we learned to have standards. I get it, you know. You’re fifteen, and you’re horny, and you’ve got a bit of an inferiority complex on account of your lizard face. But you don’t need to settle. It’s better to wait a bit than to rush into something like this.”

He sat down next to Tarim and tousled his thick curls. “Chin up, kid.”

“I really thought she was nice,” Tarim whimpered. “I thought she liked me.”

“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did, but she liked easy money better. Maybe she did, but she got scared of fucking it up, so she decided to make it happen sooner rather than later. You’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter. Fuck her.”

“Fuck her,” Tarim muttered, hugging his legs to his chest.

“You know what the good part about breakups is, though?”

“What?”

“People are nice to you for a while. Especially non-legal guardian types.”

He gave a strained chuckle, wiping tears from his normal eye with a sleeve. His yellow eye didn’t weep. “Does that mean I get to decide what’s for dinner?”

“Within reason.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Nice. Listen, I’ll take you to Bob’s place for a bit, is that all right? I’ve got girl problems of my own right now.”

“Really?” Tarim asked with a snort. “What are you lecturing me for, then?”

“Good question.”

Bob was happy to take the kid off his hands for a few hours. As expected, his apartment was immaculately clean, and he had even beautified the entire hallway of his floor. He sensed Tarim’s distress without Jacob saying anything and took him inside to show him some machine parts he was tinkering with.

After that, Jacob went back to Becca’s. He felt ready to deal with everything now. Until he walked in the door, and he found her standing there with a greeting card in her hand.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Jacob frowned deeply. “You followed me?”

“No. I had Johnny follow you.”

Ah. Smart.

“Well?” she continued. ‘We need to meet’—what does that mean? Are you stepping out on me with some sexy sixty-year-old?”

“Are you stupid? You really think that?”

“What do you want me to think when you won’t tell me anything?”

“It’s—”

“If you tell me it’s nothing I’ll hit you!”

“It’s just… some guy who helps me out sometimes. The really annoying guy. That’s how I get in touch with him. There, happy?”

“No, I’m not happy!” She really did hit him this time, right in the gut. She only hurt herself, angrily shaking her hand. “You broke a pinky promise!”

“How did I?”

“You said you were just going for a walk. That wasn’t just a walk! You’re scheming!”

“I’m not scheming.”

Becca punched him again. And again. And again. “Stop! Making! Me! Hit! You! Ouch!” She held up both her red-knuckled hands with a pout that was too cute to take seriously.

“I think this would be considered domestic violence if you didn’t have soft little teddy bear hands,” Jacob muttered.

She pointed an accusing finger at his face. “No jokes! You don’t get to make jokes right now!”

“Okay.”

“You’re going to sit down, and you’re going to tell me everything. Everything.”

“If I do, will you forgive me?”

She crossed her arms. “I’ll think about it. And you need to convince me you’re not cheating.”

“With a ‘sexy sixty-year-old’, as you put it?”

“Yes.”

“Boy, I’ll try my best.”

“No jokes!”

So he sat down, and he told her everything. Everything everything. About the torture, and the starvation, and the days he spent alone, and what happened with him and Fenris, and what happened to Tarim’s grandfather, and the little girl named Rebekka who had died with hands coming out of her mouth, and his great and terrible new aspect, and all his trips to the realms of death, and the rune he had gained, and Ender, and remembering Lardo’s again, and all the killing he had done, including Starman. Except for one last thing. He faltered there.

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She listened to the whole thing in silence, only nodding occasionally. Then, when he went silent, she asked: “Is that everything?”

Even then, he considered lying to her. But he had let her down enough.

“No,” he said. “There’s one more thing. But I…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know how to tell you about it. Because you won’t see me the same, after.”

“Try me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Try me anyway.”

He couldn’t look at her. He’d spent all this time convincing himself it didn’t matter, but it was rotting him from the inside. It was at least half the reason why he couldn’t sleep.

“I killed a kid,” he said after a while. “Fourteen or fifteen, something like that. I can’t even call it an accident, I was just careless. Or overconfident. I thought I could kill people however I liked, and it wouldn’t matter. But I killed a kid. Tore his throat out. And now he punishes me in my dreams, along with all the rest.”

Becca was quiet for a moment. “But you’re not in trouble? No one’s… coming after you or anything?”

“No, but… What? What do you mean?”

She wrapped her arms around his and put her head on his shoulder. “Then it’s okay. If you’re safe, it’s all okay.”

Jacob found his face twisting into a grimace. “What? Why aren’t you angry?”

“Because I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care who you kill, as long as you come back to me.”

“That’s awful, Becca. Why would you say something like that?”

Her wide-eyed, questioning look made his stomach go in knots.

“This isn’t you. You should be angry with me. You should be disgusted. You should be, I don’t know… Not like this.”

“It’s okay,” she insisted.

“It’s not okay. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re the good one. You’re the one who cares about this stuff.”

“Then I think you might have forgotten some things.”

Jacob was all cold. He found himself wanting to pull away from Becca’s soft arms. He licked his dry lips, his words all jumbled inside him. “I haven’t forgotten that much. You’re the good one. I know that.”

“I’m not the good one, Jacob. I’m the cute one, maybe. I’m the ditzy one. I’m the nice one. But I’m not the good one. I’m the same as you.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. We’re the same. Because to you, only I exist. And to me, only you exist. You’ve told me the thing you’re ashamed about. Do you want to hear mine?”

He didn’t. He asked her anyway.

“What is it?”

“Now that you’re here, I’m happy the world ended. My aunt’s dead. Your dad’s dead. His whore wife is dead, too. The shitty exes, the fake friends, the heartless foster parents, they’re all gone. All the people we like are here. And all the ones who hurt you are dust. And I don’t care who died in the way of you getting to me. That’s my confession.”

“I don’t like hearing you talk like this.”

“I know, Jacob.” She kissed his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I try to keep things light for you. I know it’s how you cope. But if you’ve really forgotten, I need to tell you. I am not the good one. Do you remember your third foster family? The… Kleiners, I think.”

Jacob searched his memories, and upon finding only a fuzzy gap he shook his head numbly.

“Well, I found out that the dad was touching you. You didn’t tell me, obviously—you didn’t want me to worry. But I would snoop on the families you went to, to make sure they were good people.

“He wasn’t. Richard, that was his name. I stabbed him in the neck with a pair of scissors. He was in the hospital for three weeks. They gave you up after that. I’m happy I did it.”

Jacob kept shaking his head. “I don’t like this. Please tell me this is a really weird joke.”

She pulled herself higher onto him, tugging him down by a handful of his shirt, and planted a kiss on his cheek. She put her other hand through his hair, messing around with it. “It’s a little unfair, I think. The expectations you put on me. The good one. The perfect one. Clean hands, right? You go out and dirty yours, and I stay here. Where nothing can ruin me.”

“Please, Becca. I don’t want to hear this.” He would have shed tears, but his eyes didn’t like to make those anymore.

“There was this girl you were seeing. I want to say Tiffany. You remember Tiffany?”

“I do. She cheated on me.”

“Yes she did. I didn’t like that very much.”

“What did you do?”

“I paid this guy with an STD to get in her pants and fuck her raw. I thought there was some kind of poetic justice in that, I don’t know. I think she got pregnant too, which made it extra funny.”

“Becca…”

“I was happy to let another woman have you, Jacob. Kind of. For a while. Except I realized none of them were any good for you. They didn’t know you like I did. They’d say and do the wrong things all the time, and it made me want to rip all their hair out. But I still didn’t want to tell you how I felt about you, because I couldn’t handle the idea of you rejecting me. I thought I might kill myself if you rejected me. The brother-sister thing, you remember that?”

“I remember that.”

“It was only kind of a joke. I thought we were too close for you to ever see me that way. I thought you’d play the big brother forever. And that was fine. But then you died, and I… had to say something.” She kissed him on the mouth, came away biting his lower lip. “It made me really happy when I found out you felt the same way. Because I knew. I knew. No one could make you happier than me.”

Jacob had checked out at this point. “Is this what they call ‘codependency’?” he muttered through Becca’s increasingly insistent kisses.

She giggled at that. “Probably. But it feels good, being codependent.”

“What about everyone else? What about Tarim? He’s in my life now, whether I like it or not. It’s not just us.”

“If they’re good to you, and good for you, they get to be part of our family. If not, maybe keep me away from scissors?” Then she quickly added: “That was a joke. Kind of. Mostly.”

I don’t like this.

He would have assumed it was one of his nightmares, except there weren’t nearly enough hands involved.

“But you always wanted me to be a hero,” he said. “You wanted me to do good.”

“You wanted me to want you to be good. Oh, I mean, I do like all the hero stuff. I really do. Or I did. I don’t care as much anymore. I’ve got my own hero now, and he’s enough.”

He let her keep kissing him, his arms limp by his sides.

“Doesn’t it feel better now, the shameful thing you did?” she asked. “When it’s shuffled in with all the other shameful things.”

“No. Not really.”

We’re bad people.

“Here’s the deal, mister,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ll be the good one. I’ll be the perfect one. And I’ll keep my hands clean. As long as you keep coming back to me. As long as you never leave.”

“I won’t leave,” Jacob muttered.

“Even after all that?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. I love you, Jacob.”

“I love you… too.”

Her hand migrated down to his pants, and she undid the button. “All this honesty got me in the mood. Are you in the mood?”

“Uh…”

*****

One extremely confusing lovemaking session later…

Strangely enough, that was the best sex he’d had in his life.

Becca was back to her normal, cute self. Like nothing ever happened. Like she hadn’t just dropped several atomic-level bombshells on him.

“I’ve got to pick up Tarim,” he said when Becca came out of the shower. “I’ll take him out to eat or something. He broke up with his girlfriend.”

“Oh no, why?”

“Well, she took all that money I gave him and bailed.”

“That’ll do it, I guess. Poor thing.” She started pulling clothes out of her closet and getting dressed, tossing rejected items in a pile on the bed. “Do I get to come with?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“I thought maybe you were angry with me.”

“I am angry with you. But… I don’t know. I guess I don’t have the right to judge. Do you want to hear a funny joke?”

“Sure!”

“What’s the hardest kind of tea to swallow?”

“Hmm…”

“Just ask me what kind.”

“What kind?”

“Realitea.”

She gave a snorting giggle at that, hand over her mouth. “That’s the worst! Where did you even hear that?”

“Blame yourself. It’s your stupid book.” He went and fetched 202 Perfect Knee-slappers from his bag and threw it at her.

She flipped through it, mouth going into a surprised O. “It’s… You saved it! Where did you even find this thing? I thought you threw it away years ago.”

“Well, there wasn’t really anything I could save from the apartment. Ender gave it to me when he gave me back my memories. No idea where he got it from.”

She kept giggling to herself while struggling to get a tight top over her head, complicated by the fact that she refused to let go of the book. “Realitea. It’s funny ‘cause the planet blew up.”

“It’s funny ‘cause I don’t know what to do with what I know now.”

She came over to him and tapped him softly on the head with the flat of the book. “You don’t have to think about it anymore. That’s your problem, Jacob. You think too much.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“You’re also a bit of a contrarian.” She pulled on a pair of jeans, jumping up and down to get them over her hips. “So? Do I get to come?”

“Of course you do, Becca.”

She grinned, putting those lovely dimples in her cheeks. “‘Cause you can’t stay mad at me.”

“Because...”

“Let’s go cheer up your son.”

“He’s not my son.”

“Okayyy, whatever you sayyy.” She stopped in the bedroom doorway and faced him, arms behind her back. “You really don’t need to worry. I’ll be perfect for you, I promise. I’ll be everything you want me to be.”

I worry.

But the sweetness of her smile made it difficult.