Sunday was warm in the way that felt dishonest.
The kind of golden, low-angled light that made the city look like a painting of itself — all softened edges and amber windows and the particular slow pace of a weekend afternoon that hadn't been told yet that anything had gone wrong. Outside, people were having the kind of Sundays that Sundays were supposed to be. The market I'd walked through with Kenzie yesterday was probably still half-running. The river path was probably busy.
Inside my apartment, the light came through at the same angle and landed on the same things and felt like it was happening to someone else's room.
I don't remember exactly when Bella arrived.
That was the honest version of it. One moment the apartment was empty and I was on the couch with my phone in my hand, not reading anything, just holding it — and then she was there. In the armchair across from me, feet tucked underneath her, her own phone in her lap. Like she'd always been there. Like arriving and settling and making herself quietly present was something she'd done so naturally that my brain hadn't registered the transition.
She didn't ask if I was okay. She didn't ask anything.
She was just there.
Her phone made occasional small sounds — a notification, a page turning on some reading app, the faint tap of someone texting back. Mine made no sounds because I wasn't doing anything with it, just holding it the way you hold something when you need your hands to be occupied.
The afternoon moved at its Sunday pace.
At some point I put my phone down on the cushion beside me. Bella glanced up, briefly, then went back to whatever she was doing. The light shifted slightly as the sun moved. The city outside continued its business.
I thought about the river wall. About the ceramic bird. About the King's voice on the phone — that specific measured courtesy, thank you, Mr. Cartez, like I'd done him a service that deserved acknowledgment. About Kenzie's face at the exact moment the warmth left it.
I didn't think about those things in any organized way. They just moved through, one after another, like weather.
Bella didn't try to interrupt them.
That was the thing about her presence in those hours that I couldn't have asked for and wouldn't have known to ask for — it wasn't comfort exactly, not the kind that tried to fix or reframe or make the thing smaller than it was. It was just company. The specific company of someone who understood that sometimes being a zombie required a witness rather than an intervention.
Jade used to do this.
The thought arrived quietly and settled without drama. Jade, on the nights after jobs that had gone wrong or jobs that had gone right but cost something anyway — she'd find her way into the same room and exist near me without demanding anything from the existing. She'd done it the night before the bank job, sitting with her back against the wall, reading something on her phone, just there.
I looked at Bella across the room.
She wasn't Jade. The comparison wasn't entirely fair to either of them. But there was something in the quality of it — the particular grace of choosing to be present without requiring the other person to perform gratitude for it — that lived in the same neighbourhood as something I'd thought I'd left in Marseille.
The light had gone from gold to something softer and lower when she finally moved. She uncurled from the chair with the unhurried ease of someone who had decided something without making it a production.
"Come on," she said.
I looked at her.
"Evening walk," she said. "Trust me. It eases someone."
"It eases someone," I repeated.
"That's what I said." She was already at the door, pulling on her jacket. "The city's different at this hour. And you've been sitting in this room long enough that you're starting to match the furniture." She glanced back. "Get your shoes."
I got my shoes.
She was right about the city.
There was a particular quality to Annex City in the hour after the sun went down but before the nighttime properly started — a kind of in-between light, the sky going through its full range from amber to deep violet while the streetlights took over gradually rather than all at once. The evening crowd was different from the afternoon crowd, moving with less purpose and more permission, people who had finished their day and were now in the part of it that belonged to them.
Bella walked the way she always walked — with the particular awareness of someone who was always, on some level, mapping exits and noting positions, but who had learned to let that sit underneath the surface rather than on top of it. Beside me rather than ahead of me. Unhurried.
We didn't talk for the first few minutes, which was fine. The city provided enough to look at.
"Better?" she said eventually.
I thought about it honestly. "Getting there."
"Good." She looked at the street ahead. "You don't have to tell me what happened."
"I know."
"I'm going to assume it had something to do with why you were awake at six this morning and why you spent all of yesterday looking like someone had removed a significant internal organ."
"That's a vivid description."
"I'm precise." A beat. "You also left Bella-shaped gap in the building this morning for several hours and came back quieter than you left."
"Kenzie," I said. Just the name, because it covered enough.
She nodded once. Not pushing further.
We turned at the junction near the old canal path, where the water reflected the last of the sky and the evening felt genuinely slower than everywhere else. A few people sat along the low wall with takeaway cups. A dog was investigating something near the base of a lamp post with committed thoroughness.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Yes."
"How did you end up doing this? The work."
She was quiet for a moment, the particular quality of quiet that meant she was deciding how much of an answer the question deserved rather than whether to answer at all.
"My grandmother got sick when I was fifteen," she said. "Before that, we managed. She worked, I went to school, we were fine in the specific way of people who don't have much but have each other and have made peace with that." She paused. "When she got sick, fine stopped being possible. The kind of sick that costs money in increments — treatment, medication, the gap between what the system covers and what it doesn't." She looked at the canal. "I needed money. Someone offered me work. I took it."
"What kind of work?"
"The kind that used what I was already good at." A slight pause. "I could move through spaces without being noticed. I was fast. I learned quickly. The first few jobs were small. Then they weren't."
"And TRAD?"
"TRAD found me eventually. The way TRAD finds most people — by watching long enough to know what someone needs and then offering it at the right moment." She turned the collar of her jacket up slightly against the evening chill. "Better pay. More structure. Real equipment instead of whatever I'd been improvising with." She glanced at me. "You?"
"Similar shape," I said. "Different details."
She accepted this without pressing for the details.
The canal path opened up ahead into a wider stretch where the city pulled back slightly and the sky had more room. The violet had deepened now, the first stars becoming visible in the east — tentative, the way stars always appeared here, negotiating with the light pollution.
"She's still in the hospital," Bella said. Not as an addition to what she'd said before. Just something she'd decided to say. "My grandmother. She has good days and she has bad days, and when I go to see her on her good days she asks if I'm eating properly and whether I've made any friends yet." Something moved through her expression — not quite a smile, something more complicated. "She still thinks I'm shy."
"Are you?"
"No." A beat. "I'm selective. There's a difference."
I thought about that. The particular precision of it — the way she'd taken something that other people would have called a flaw and reframed it as a preference. Not because it was a defence mechanism, just because it was accurate.
"She helped me once," Bella said. "The Princess. Before all of this. I was in a situation that had gotten beyond my ability to manage alone, and someone connected me to her. She helped without making it a transaction." She looked at the canal water. "That's why I'm here. Not because of TRAD. Because of her."
I looked at Bella for a moment.
The necklace the child had given her was still at her collarbone — she'd worn it again, the lopsided beads catching the last of the evening light. She hadn't mentioned it and neither had I, but I'd noticed.
"She's worth protecting," I said.
"She is." A beat. She was quiet for a moment, something moving through her expression that she didn't let reach her voice. "I knew her when we were young, actually. Before she was — before any of this. We were friends." She said it simply, the way she said things she'd decided were worth saying. "She's always been hard to understand. But she helped me when it counted, more than once."
"And that's enough."
"For me it is." She looked at the canal water. "Which is why I'm glad she has people around her who—"
She stopped.
Something shifted in her expression — the particular internal shift of someone who has just caught themselves at the edge of saying something they've decided not to say. Not because it wasn't true. Because of what saying it would mean.
If Marx knew the Princess and Kenzie were the same person, every mission would change. The distance he needed to do this work cleanly — the operational distance she'd watched him build and maintain — would collapse. He'd second-guess every brief. He'd hesitate at every decision point. She'd seen what happened to people who couldn't separate the personal from the operational. She wasn't going to be the reason that happened to him.
He was smart enough to get there himself. He just didn't need her pointing the way.
"Anyway," she said.
She said it without explanation, and didn't offer one.
Anyway.
She'd stopped herself from finishing the sentence and the specific place she'd stopped it was somewhere I could make a reasonable guess about and decided not to push.
We walked in silence for a bit, the city doing its evening thing around us, warm enough still that the cold was just present rather than unpleasant.
"Better?" she asked again, after a while.
I checked myself honestly.
The weight from yesterday was still there. The river wall. The ceramic bird. The King's measured thank you. All of it still sitting exactly where I'd left it.
But the apartment was no longer the whole world. The canal path was real. The tentative stars were real. The dog at the lamp post, the people with their takeaway cups, the particular in-between light of this specific hour in this specific city — all of it real and present and happening whether any of it hurt or not.
"Yeah," I said. "Better."
She nodded, satisfied, the way she was satisfied by things that had gone as she'd expected rather than things that had surprised her.
We turned back toward the building, the city walking with us, the evening settling around us in its unhurried way, and neither of us said much else, which was fine.
It had already been enough.