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Jayce Talis served three terms and was one of the most compelling members of parliament in recent decades. He had allies across party lines, a fundraising ability that political commentators described as "frankly alarming," and a legislative record that included two major infrastructure bills and a landmark green energy package. By most accounts, he seemed to be at the beginning of his career rather than the middle of it—his political trajectory had that particular quality of upward momentum that made senior colleagues uneasy and younger ones imitative. Fourteen months ago, he resigned mid-session—without any prior announcement, just a brief statement saying he was "stepping back to attend to personal matters"—and the resulting media storm was the kind that only happens when someone does something that makes no logical sense.
He hadn't been caught doing anything. There was no scandal. He didn't appear to be ill. The speculation was wide-ranging, from the plausible (he was positioning himself for an executive run and didn't want to be entangled in the coming budget negotiations) to the absurd (one well-trafficked political forum maintained that he had been recruited by a tech billionaire to run a shadow policy institute in a neutral territory).
The truth, when it emerged, was quieter than any of the theories. It happened in a kitchen in a coastal town I'll call Zaun—a port of forty thousand people, with air that smelled of saltwater and fish and chips, and on certain mornings, something faintly floral from the estuaries. The house had been left to a great-nephew by his great-aunt twenty years ago, and it had been renovated the way houses are renovated when someone actually lives in them: inconsistently, with love, and with no thought given to resale value.
Jayce Talis answered the door himself. He was taller than he looked on television—six-three, solidly built, which made you wonder whether he'd maintained some fitness regimen or whether the house itself was sufficient. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue flannel shirt that was either his or Viktor's and, from the shoulder seam, was probably Viktor's. He hadn't shaved in at least four days, and he looked, frankly, more relaxed than any photograph taken during his tenure.
"Viktor is finishing something," he said. This sentence would recur throughout the afternoon. "Twenty minutes. Come in."
A grey-and-white husky mix slipped in beside him with the composure of an animal accustomed to this situation but not yet committed to enjoying it. Her name was Marzipan. Her eyes were the pale, unsettling blue of glaciers, entirely without warmth.
"She's fine," Jayce said.
Marzipan continued to look at us.
"She's assessing," he added.
The house was small. It was a late-nineteenth-century fisherman's cottage on the inland edge of the old quarter, ten minutes' walk from the water. It had accumulated the evidence of real habitation: books with cracked spines shelved horizontally because there was no more vertical space; a coat rack near the door that was losing the structural argument; Viktor's forearm crutches leaning against the wall beside it, and what appeared to be a disassembled bicycle frame for reasons I didn't ask about. Through the kitchen window, the estuary was visible, and the sea beyond.
The kitchen itself was modern, clearly recently renovated, and well done—substantial stone counters, a professional-grade espresso machine with a laminated instruction sheet attached that had the look of something made by a person who wanted the steps to be unambiguous. I was examining the sheet when Jayce made us both coffee.
"Viktor made that," he said, noticing. "He said—and I'm quoting—'it's laminated.'"
"It's laminated because you kept getting it wet," Viktor said from the doorway.
Jayce told me later that Viktor used the forearm crutches on bad days and not on good ones; he walked carefully and with a slight list, in the manner of someone who had long since made a separate peace with the fact that his body was not going to comply with every request. He was wearing dark trousers and a charcoal sweater with a small burn mark on the right cuff, which Jayce had learned was from a soldering iron.
"He told you he was ready to talk," he said. This was to Jayce, not to me, but it wasn't quite a question.
"I told her I was ready," Jayce confirmed.
Viktor looked at him for a moment with an expression I found difficult to read—somewhere between exasperation and something warmer, with the warmth not quite visible beneath the exasperation. Then he looked at me.
"All right," he said, and picked up his cup.
They met eleven years ago at a university fundraising dinner. Jayce was there with the ambition to go into politics, though people who knew him then say it wasn't quite ambition—more an assumption he held about his own future, the way a person with a good voice assumes they'll be asked to perform at family gatherings. Viktor had been invited because his doctoral supervisor had received a departmental research prize.
"You were at the back of the room," Jayce said.
"I was planning to leave," Viktor said.
"You'd had one drink."
"I was planning to leave quickly."
"You'd been planning to leave for forty-five minutes."
Viktor paused, and Jayce took this as agreement.
What was not disputed: they talked for two hours; Viktor's train left without him, and he didn't catch the next one either. When I asked what they had talked about, Jayce looked at the ceiling.
"He was doing his doctoral thesis on thermal composites, and he wanted to talk about the relationship between materials science and renewable energy infrastructure policy, and I—" He paused. "At that point, I believed I was fairly well-informed on energy policy. I'd done a lot of reading. But Viktor—" He gestured. "He dismantled most of what I thought I knew, in a very calm, patient, efficient way. Not unkindly. Just very—" He looked at Viktor.
"You had missed several things," Viktor said.
"I had missed several things," Jayce agreed, without any apparent resentment.
"He told me at the end," Jayce said. "He said, 'You're asking the right questions. You just don't have the framework yet.'"
The expression on Viktor's face when this was repeated was one I couldn't quite characterize. Perhaps he found it gratifying and preferred not to show it.
They were, as Jayce put it, quietly together for five years before he ran for parliament. Quietly meaning: the way people are before anyone is paying attention. When Jayce moved to the capital, Viktor followed—from the university where he'd completed his doctorate to a research fellowship at an institute in the city, the way people follow partners, without announcement. He didn't, by all accounts, love the capital. He found it loud in a way that had nothing to do with volume.
When Jayce decided to stand for parliament—decided meaning he finally did the thing Viktor had suggested six years earlier, which had never quite left him—Viktor was a precise and methodical supporter who had made clear from the beginning what was and wasn't negotiable.
"He said, 'I'll help you with policy. I won't do media. I won't do interviews. I won't attend events if I can avoid it.'" Jayce smiled. "I thought he'd ease into it. He didn't."
"I attended four events in three years," Viktor said. "I went because Jayce wanted me there. I stood somewhere out of the way and waited for them to end."
By most accounts, the end of the first parliamentary term and the emergence of their relationship generated coverage that was mild and broadly positive. There were, inevitably, some objections—there are always objections—but the initial reception was relatively decent. Jayce's office released a photograph of the two of them at a constituency event; Viktor was in the background, slightly out of focus, with the expression of someone who had agreed to be photographed and was no longer pretending to enjoy it. Jayce's vote in favor of his first major infrastructure bill had received cross-party support, and an editorial following the vote called him "the kind of legislator parliament is increasingly short of." Viktor attended the swearing-in. He stood at the back. Then he found an exit.
Then Jayce voted for the trade agreement.
By any statistical measure, this was not a controversial vote—it passed with a strong majority. The provision Viktor's critics would later weaponize was one Jayce had pushed to amend in committee, unsuccessfully, and the amendment would have weakened it. Still, he voted in favor, because the alternative was to oppose a framework he broadly supported over a provision he found imperfect.
The next morning, a political blogger—the kind who was nominally a commentator but functionally operated like a targeting system—published a piece.
Jayce didn't repeat the headline. He said it was phrased as a question in a way that implied the answer was obvious and disqualifying. It used Viktor's full name. It used the word Ukrainian in a way that felt like it had been retrieved from a box under the house.
"That was the beginning of everything," he said, flatly.
The next two years moved in waves. There would be a quieter period—weeks when the coverage was about Jayce's work and Viktor could go to the laboratory without tracking who was outside—and then something would break the surface and the wave would come again. An international news cycle touching on Ukraine, and Viktor's citizenship would be relitigated in comment sections, his mother's immigration documents discussed as if they were public record, his father's family in Kyiv deployed as a form of evidence. Or it would be a slow news week and someone would surface old photographs of Viktor at academic conferences, paired with recent photographs of Jayce at committee hearings, and produce a piece that was ostensibly about foreign policy entanglement but was functionally about whether a Ukrainian-American man should be permitted to sleep beside someone who had voted yes on a trade bill.
"Most people weren't like that," Jayce said, with the air of someone wanting to put this on record. "I want that to be clear. Most people were fine. People were kind. We got letters. Actual letters, handwritten. There was a woman who organized a support group online for partners of public figures who'd experienced similar situations—" He paused. "We still have her letter."
"On the refrigerator," Viktor said quietly.
"On the refrigerator," Jayce confirmed. "But cruelty has a volume problem that kindness doesn't. Cruelty is louder per unit. A thousand kind things and ten cruel ones, and the ten cruel ones shape the room differently."
I asked Viktor what it was like to be on the receiving end of the cruelty.
He was quiet for a moment, in a way that indicated he was looking for the most accurate answer rather than the most comfortable one.
"It was—intermittent, which is harder than sustained," he said. "Sustained, you can build your life around it. Intermittent means you don't know when it's safe to relax. I found I couldn't relax." He paused. "I was never good at not monitoring. I'm constitutionally unsuited to not monitoring. So I monitored, and the monitoring became the problem."
He said this with the precise self-knowledge of someone who had identified a feature of their own nature in retrospect and was still mildly annoyed by it.
"I thought I was managing," he said. "I believed I was managing for a long time. I was publishing. The research—" He paused. "The research was going very well. The laboratory work was still completely rational. When everything else was—" He paused. "The laboratory still made sense."
He said the laboratory still made sense the way someone else might say the children are fine. It was the sentence you reached for when you were checking whether you still existed.
There is a physiological dimension to this story that runs parallel to everything else and is, in some ways, inseparable from it. Viktor's joint condition—a degenerative disease affecting his right hip and knee that had first appeared in his mid-twenties and worsened over seven years—was a condition the city made worse. Eight months of cold and damp per year. Lab work that required long periods of standing. He had been waiting for a specialist appointment on a list that kept being pushed back, partly because his condition was classified as manageable rather than urgent, and partly because the healthcare system was sufficiently overwhelmed by 340,000 patients to make it difficult to distinguish manageable from deteriorating.
"He waited fourteen months for the list," Jayce said. "I could have—I should have been able to—" He stopped. "I could have found a way to get him seen sooner. I didn't, because Viktor told me not to use my position for personal benefit."
"I stand by that," Viktor said.
"I know you do. I also feel I should have been more—" He seemed to work something out internally. "Forceful."
"I was managing," Viktor said.
"You were in pain every day."
"Many people are in pain every day."
"Viktor," Jayce said, and the single word carried the weight of a long sentence.
Viktor looked at his cup. "The cold made it worse," he finally said. "I know that. I was keeping it controlled. I had coping strategies." He paused. "But by that point I wasn't being rational about how I was handling it."
The incendiary device came in the third year, in October, on a Thursday night, late. Jayce was in a committee session that ran past ten. Viktor was at home.
At ten-fifteen, the device came through the living room window. The fire was contained quickly; the device hadn't fully ignited. Viktor called the fire brigade himself and was sitting on the front step in his coat when the first truck arrived, his hands in his pockets.
"I got a call from my aide," Jayce said. "She told me what had happened, and I—I remember asking her to repeat it three times. I was certain I'd misheard. I left the session and drove there as fast as I could." He paused. "There were fire trucks, police vehicles, neighbors standing in the street. Viktor was on the front step. His coat was fully buttoned. He was sitting very straight."
I asked what he was thinking.
"I thought: something's wrong and it's not the fire," he said quietly. "I know Viktor—he's not someone who panics. He's genuinely calm under pressure. I've watched him manage lab incidents, equipment failures, bad news. He goes straight to the problem; he doesn't spiral. But this was too careful. It felt deliberately maintained."
Viktor turned to look out the window. The estuary lights had gone pale and flat.
"I was on autopilot," he said. "I've thought about that night since. I remember very clearly that I wasn't afraid. I realized it afterward—I should have been afraid."
When did the fear arrive?
He considered. "Over time," he said. "The way water gets into a building. It comes quietly. You don't see it happening, and then one day the building is compromised."
The police investigated. Two individuals were eventually charged in connection with the attack; the case moved through the courts slowly, the way these cases do, requiring sustained attention over subsequent years.
"We stayed," Jayce said. "Viktor didn't want to move. He said—what did you say? That moving would feel like—"
"Like making a concession," Viktor said. "I didn't want to move because of them."
"I understood that," Jayce said. "I also worried about it. But Viktor had decided, and I didn't want to—"
Perhaps this is the moment to talk about what the eighteen months following the attack were like for Viktor, though the difficulty is that neither of them wants to describe it in language that feels like taxonomy—a living diagnosis, moving around the kitchen, checking boxes. Viktor was particularly resistant to this framing.
Jayce described the changes in daily life with precision and specificity. Viktor's sleep declined and eventually disappeared. Viktor's eating became irregular in ways that were hard to articulate; he would stay at the laboratory until midnight and then come home and sit in the kitchen without turning on the lights, seemingly unaware of it. Jayce would come downstairs and find him in the dark, and Viktor would look up and say something completely normal, as if he'd been thinking, not not-thinking.
"The bad kind," Jayce said. "That quiet started—becoming more frequent."
I asked Viktor if he was aware of it.
A long pause.
"I was aware I was exhausted," he said finally. "I knew everything was at a low point. I told myself it was fatigue. I had been under significant and sustained external pressure. My physical condition was also deteriorating." He paused. "I was giving myself a version."
He said this the way a scientist examines methodology for sources of error. Some aspects accurate, some aspects not.
"When did the version stop holding?" I asked.
He looked at his hands around his cup.
"When the work became difficult," he said. "I used to be able to—I used to process a great deal. But when I would sit at my desk and the thinking wouldn't go where I needed it to—when I couldn't follow a line of reasoning in the way I normally could—" He paused. "That was when I knew there was something I couldn't address alone."
He said this so directly that it took a moment to understand what it had cost him.
Jayce did not ask Viktor outright if he was all right, and he knew that about himself. Because Viktor had a preemptive way of foreclosing concern—not quite deception, more that he led with a version of himself that was organized and functional, and that was the first thing everyone in the room encountered, and you had to decide whether to press further. Most people didn't press further. Jayce spent a long time deciding.
"I was—I was trying to balance caring and surveillance," Jayce said. "Viktor didn't want to be surveilled." He looked at Viktor.
"And—" Viktor started, paused, restarted. "I wasn't trying to appear capable. For him, and for myself. I didn't want to be a problem. Looking back, this was irrational. Jayce had never treated me as a problem, but I felt very strongly that this was something I should be managing, and that I was managing it."
A thin, dry expression moved across his face.
"Scientists are generally good at studying things," he said. "They turn out to be less good at studying themselves."
There is a thing I had to ask him, and there was no way to soften the approach, so I didn't try.
I told Jayce: I knew the specific moment. I'd read enough secondary material, timelines, post-resignation accounts to have a general outline. But I wanted him to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. He stroked Marzipan's ear. Marzipan had commandeered the full length of the bench beside him.
"I was in a committee session," he said, "that ran late. I came home—it was early November, dark by five—Viktor wasn't in the kitchen, wasn't in the study, I called his name."
He paused and started again.
"The bathroom door was closed."
He paused again.
"He'd run a bath. He was in it. The water had gone cold; he'd been in it for some time." He looked at the table. "There was a razor blade on the edge of the bath."
Viktor said across the table, calmly and clearly: "Nothing happened."
"Nothing happened," Jayce repeated. He said it the same way, as if it were a phrase they had agreed on, which perhaps it was.
"I moved it," Jayce said. "And then I—I got in. Essentially that. I got in the bath with my clothes on and put my arms around him. The water was cold." He paused. "He was shaking."
Viktor was looking at the table now.
"We sat there—" Jayce shook his head. "For a long time. I don't know how long." He exhaled. "I won't tell you what we said. That's—that's ours. But I stayed with him, and after he was asleep I sat in the hall outside the bedroom for—I don't know how long. Thinking about what would have happened if I'd come home five minutes later."
"I wasn't able to—I eventually understood I couldn't answer that question," he said.
"There was a period," Jayce said, "when I was frightened to go to work. Genuinely frightened to leave the house. Viktor—" He looked at Viktor. "Viktor was impatient with that."
"I was still functional," Viktor said.
"He was still functional," Jayce agreed. "He went to the laboratory. But I was going to parliament, sitting in meetings, not present. I was doing the minimum—maintaining the shape of the role." He paused. "That was when I understood how much of my work had been genuinely—"
And Jayce later learned why the bathtub incident had happened, in the way he came to learn things: by accident. Weeks earlier, he'd seen a pre-publication abstract for trial data on an experimental compound being tested for treatment-resistant depression. The early results were remarkable. He looked at the enrollment criteria. He technically qualified.
"I knew the trial was phase two," he said. "I knew what that meant. I knew the sample size was insufficient to support the conclusions they were drawing."
"I—" He paused. "I am a scientist. I know how to read these things."
He looked at his hands.
The reaction was deeply alarming, and the weeks that followed—the discontinuation—were significantly worse than what came before. He was hospitalized. Jayce didn't describe this period in detail.
Viktor, on the hospitalization, said: "Extremely unpleasant."
He said it in a flat voice that I believed, that was not performed flatness—the voice of someone who had genuinely audited their methodology and found the flaw, and was still slightly surprised they'd made the error.
"He is a brilliant scientist," Jayce said, with something complex in his voice that was neither fully sad nor fully tender. "It didn't make him immune to his own illness."
"No," Viktor said. "It didn't."
Jayce resigned three months after the bathtub night, three days after Viktor was discharged from hospital.
I asked about those three months—why not sooner? Or in some sense, why later than it should have been?
"In the first two months after that night, I couldn't make any real decisions," he said. "I was going through the motions. Showing up, doing things, leaving."
He leaned forward slightly.
"I had been calculating," he said. "Calculating: what does this cost? I had been calculating this intermittently for years and kept arriving at the wrong answer, because I'd been weighting one variable incorrectly. Which was the work." He said it simply. "I had been weighting the work too heavily."
What changed?
Viktor was quiet for a long time.
"I didn't want to be the cause of things," he finally said. "I didn't want to be—I wanted to correct for the error as quickly as possible. Return to normal function. Stop being a variable." He paused. "Apparently I hadn't."
"He was the reason I entered this in the first place," Jayce said. "He was the one who encouraged me to stand. He built half my policy framework. Much of what I was advocating in my first term came out of conversations with Viktor at the kitchen table at eleven o'clock at night." He paused. "I built a career on him as its foundation, and that career had become the reason he was—" He shook his head. "Once I was willing to see it, it was obvious." "I didn't think twice about leaving parliament."
Viktor had reportedly urged him not to resign.
I asked Jayce directly.
"He urged me not to," Jayce confirmed.
"His reasoning was sound," Viktor said, with the air of someone who had articulated this argument many times and was restating it again for the record. "But during a crisis you shouldn't make significant, permanent decisions. You should wait until things stabilize. That's basic."
"I considered that," Jayce said.
"For approximately two hours."
"I—"
"Jayce."
"More than two hours."
Viktor looked at me. "He filed his resignation forty-eight hours after telling me he was considering it," he said.
"I'd been considering it for months," Jayce said.
"Unproductively," Viktor said.
"Privately," Jayce countered. He looked at me. "His reasoning was correct. And the circumstances weren't going to change. The external pressure wasn't going to change; Viktor's health wasn't going to improve in an environment that was working against his recovery; my ability to do the work wasn't going to improve while I was—" He paused. "I had a colleague once who said the best decisions look like mistakes up close. You have to get far enough away to see the shape."
"It's convenient to believe that when making impulsive decisions," Viktor said.
"Fair," Jayce said.
A brief silence.
"You should at least have waited until after the infrastructure review," Viktor said, and his tone had shifted, the argument softening into something that felt practiced between them—half genuine disagreement, half a form of affection in disguise.
"The infrastructure review," Jayce said gravely, "would have taken four more months."
"So—"
"Viktor."
"Four months isn't—"
"Viktor."
A pause. Viktor made a sound that was almost a laugh.
The resignation was announced at the close of a Monday session; Jayce shook the hands he needed to shake and said the things he needed to say and drove home. He and Viktor talked until past two in the morning. He didn't tell me what they said, and I didn't ask.
The following weekend, they drove to Zaun. It took four days.
"He said the drive was eight hours," Viktor said.
"I said it could be done in a day."
"Eight hours is within a day."
"We stopped," Jayce said. "Viktor wanted to see a lighthouse."
"You wanted to see a lighthouse," Viktor said.
"You said you had."
"I said I had as a child and found it underwhelming."
"I interpreted that as—"
"Interest. You misread it." Viktor turned to me. "It was a lighthouse."
"From an architectural standpoint—"
"It was a lighthouse, Jayce. It was a building on a coast with a light in it and you stood outside it for twenty-five minutes."
"I felt—"
"Slightly disappointed," Viktor said, and there was something different in his voice now—closer to warmth than I had seen it all afternoon. "You found it slightly disappointing and you won't say so."
Jayce opened his mouth and closed it. "I thought it was—fine," he said, with great dignity.
Viktor looked at me with the warmest expression I had seen from him, which was not a small thing.
The great-aunt's house, empty for three of the past seven years, needed work. In the early months, Jayce did much of it himself, with the focus of someone who needs something to do with his hands and his time but doesn't want to put his energy into anything that requires a title. The kitchen was already good; previous tenants had done a renovation. The living room had the original hardwood floors and a new gas fireplace, and the particular beauty that results when an old house is repaired with care. The second bedroom had become Viktor's study: a desk that appeared chaotic and was not, where Jayce could find nothing and Viktor could find everything.
The heating was the first real project.
"Viktor's condition is significantly affected by cold and damp," Jayce said. "We'd lived in the capital for seven years, and I should have—" He stopped.
"I was managing," Viktor said.
"Viktor was in pain nearly every day, and I was calling that managing."
Viktor paused. "My management was not adequate," he admitted. "I accept that."
They installed radiant floor heating throughout—bedroom, study, bathroom. Six weeks after Viktor arrived in Zaun, he had his first specialist appointment, which Jayce had arranged on the second day after his resignation.
"He arranged it before I did," Viktor said, and his voice was complicated. Not exasperated—something deeper.
"He would have kept waiting," Jayce said.
"I would have handled it."
"He would have been waiting eighteen months."
"Eighteen months," Viktor said.
"He would have been in the queue for eighteen months." Jayce looked at me. "We had a consultation within six weeks, surgery within four months. His gait changed immediately. The following winter—" He seemed to look for language. "Was a completely different quality of life."
Viktor: "The floor heating also helped considerably."
"The floor heating did help," Jayce agreed.
"Very considerably." Viktor looked down at his cup. "I hadn't—I hadn't understood how my—" He paused and started again. "When you are in significant physical pain for a long time, it affects how you think. It affects how you assess your own situation. It narrows your perspective. My perspective had been narrow for—" He paused. "Several years."
He said this quietly.
"When the pain reduced—" He paused again. "The perspective opened. Noticeably."
Fourteen days after they arrived, Marzipan was adopted. She was three, had been returned to the rescue twice—the organization described her diplomatically as "very independent," which Jayce translated as "she has a strong resistance to authority and doesn't conceal it." When they met her at the rescue, she walked in, sat in front of Viktor, and looked at him with her pale glacier eyes until he said: "That's the one."
"She chose him," Jayce said. "I think she sensed that he needed someone to choose him."
Viktor: "She needed a walking schedule. I needed a walking schedule. We were compatible."
"He lets her sleep on the bed," Jayce said.
"She keeps the bed warm," Viktor said. "The floor heating doesn't reach the—"
"Viktor."
"She is warm," Viktor said, definitively.
The effect of the dog on their early months was something both of them returned to repeatedly, but neither deployed it the way some people talk about animal love, with large emotional significance. It was more practical than that. The dog needed to go out at seven in the morning. The dog needed to be fed. The dog needed a walk in the afternoon at some point, which meant they had to get up and take her, which was the thing they might not have done otherwise.
"In the early period—" Jayce started, then stopped; I think he didn't like the word recovery, found it too clinical. "There was a period when the days had no structure," he said instead. "You've lost the structure the old life gave you, and the new life hasn't formed its own structure yet. Marzipan gave the day structure. Nothing complicated. Seven in the morning, noon, five. But—" He looked at the dog. "Structure, even small structure, matters. When you have nothing else to anchor the day, you need something to anchor it."
Viktor looked at Marzipan with an expression he might not have known he was making.
In the first three months, they didn't talk seriously about work. Jayce didn't return most calls from former colleagues, and didn't return any from the two think tanks and the consultancy. Viktor finally finished a paper he'd been writing for a year and handed it in with the bleak efficiency of someone completing a task before a collapse. Then, according to Jayce, for the first time since his doctorate, he stopped completely. He didn't begin anything new, didn't apply for any positions. He apparently just read, walked the dog, and sat in the study doing what Jayce described as "staring at the water and thinking" and what Viktor called "preliminary ideation."
"He told me," Jayce said, "that he needed to find the feeling of wanting to work again, as opposed to having to work. He said—"
"I said it's like different muscle groups," Viktor said. "Wanting and having to. I had only been using one of them. Or the other had atrophied over a long time."
"That is the most Viktor description I've ever heard."
"It's accurate."
"Very accurate," Jayce agreed.
Work came back gradually. Viktor now holds a research fellowship at a regional university forty minutes by train from Zaun—smaller than his previous institute, less well funded, with students who are, in his words, "underprepared but curious." He has published two papers since arriving. His most recent one, on low-cost composite materials for coastal infrastructure applications, has been described by his department as potentially significant. Viktor told me it was "quite interesting."
"He answers every student email," Jayce said.
"I answer my emails," Viktor said.
"At eleven-thirty at night."
"Communication is—"
"Viktor sent a first-year student an email at eleven-thirty at night." "To tell her she'd asked a very good question."
Viktor was silent.
"It was a very good question," he said.
"I know," Jayce said. "I know it was a good question. That's not the point."
In the late afternoon we went for a walk, because Marzipan needed it and because four hours at a kitchen table makes the room close in, and movement helps with that. All four of us—Jayce, Viktor, Marzipan, and me—went along the estuary path to the harbour wall. Viktor's crutch made a steady rhythm on the stones. The water was tin-grey and running, as if something had been agitated for a long time and was only now beginning to settle. It smelled of salt and fish and cold, and underneath that, something mineral and alive.
Jayce walked half a step behind Viktor. He had adjusted his stride to match. He was blocking the wind. His hand was in Viktor's vicinity.