He tells her on Thursday, without her asking, which is how she knows it costs him more than anything he’s told her so far.

“I have a daughter,” he says. They’re at the bench, the evening going its usual long gold, and he says it plainly, no lead-up, the way he tends to say the things that matter most. “Lena. She’s forty-four. She believes I died in 2041.”

Mara goes very still.

“I let her believe it,” he says, before she can ask. “I’ve told myself for six years it was to protect her — that if The Accord knew I was findable, it would put her at risk by association. I’ve told myself, some days, that it was to protect myself, from having to answer for what I did. I no longer know which of those is more true. Possibly both. Possibly neither, and I’ve simply been afraid, and built a better story on top of the fear.”

“Lena,” Mara says, and hears her own voice from a distance, as if someone else is speaking it. “Voss. Systems integration architect. Sector 2.”

He looks at her, surprised. “You know her name.”

“I saw it,” she says slowly, the shape of it arriving all at once now, the audit in May, the ordinary line among two hundred names, the word that had snagged without a reason she could name at the time. “Weeks ago. A clearance audit. It didn’t mean anything to me then. I didn’t know your last name. I still don’t think I’ve ever heard you say it.”

“Voss,” he says. “I don’t use it. Habit, mostly, by now.”

She sits with the strangeness of it — that she has already, unknowingly, held this woman’s name in her hands once, filed it, closed it, moved on, the way the system trains you to move on from everything.

“Why tell me now,” she asks.

He looks toward the shed, where she doesn’t yet know what he’s kept. “Because I’ve decided to send her something. Small. Unsigned. A seed, and a line she may not even understand. It isn’t enough, and I’m doing it anyway, because I’ve run out of time to keep believing not yet is a plan rather than a failure to choose.”

“Do you want me to help?”

“I want you to know,” he says. “That’s enough for tonight. I’ll ask for help with the how, if I need it.”

She reaches for his hand again — it has become, this week, the thing she does instead of words, when words would only get in the way of what’s actually being said — and they sit together as the light fails, the name Lena Voss settling into its proper place in her, at last, where it belongs.