Page 42 of Skinwalker's Bane
He was carrying the engineer jacket and put it over the back of his chair. “Smells good.”
“It’s all in the way I dial it in,” she assured him.
They both ate in silence. At first, Devin thought it was simply because they were both so hungry. As the steak and mushrooms disappeared, though, Adam did not relax.
“Did you enjoy seeing everyone, today?” she asked.
He shrugged, chewing, his gaze on the plate.
A little while later, when she finished the last drop of the casserole, she said, “I didn’t know you knew Liya Cassel.”
“She’s Gelin’s partner,” Adam said. He concentrated on cutting up the very last strip of the streak.
Devin pushed her bowl aside. “What’s wrong, Adam? You’re all hunched in.”
He looked up at her, his eyes narrowing. “Hunched in?”
“You know what I mean. Are you feeling awkward about being stuck here? Because it isn’t a problem, you know. No one thought it was, not even me.”
He frowned. “I hadn’t even thought of that,” he muttered, as if it was one more thing added to his pile of worries.
“Then why are you toeing the dirt like a five-year-old caught doing something wrong?”
He sighed and pushed the plate away with an impatient gesture, the tendons in his wrists below the rolled up sleeve flexing at the movement. “It’s just that…” He blew out a breath. “I suck at talking. You do it way better.”
“It’s my job,” she said simply and waited.
He fumbled in the pockets of the jacket hanging over the back of the chair. “Peter and Corin and I went through Lincoln’s things the last day of the off-rotation.”
Devin put that together with Peter’s explanations when he had bought the duffel bag. “Lincoln was the fourth housemate,” she said. “That big apartment. There were four of you.”
Adam nodded. He pulled something out of the pocket and put it on his lap where she couldn’t see it.
“You found something?” she asked.
“Not much at all, actually,” Adam admitted. “We figure he sold off anything of value at market price, then recycled anything that would give him energy credits. He kept the bare minimum to live. So what we did find was a bit of a shock.” He put the thing he was hiding on the table and pushed it toward her.
Devin recognized the box. She didn’t reach for it. Instead, she just stared at it. Coldness trickled through her. Her thoughts raced. She swallowed. “I gave that to him.”
“I know.” Adam pulled the lid off the box and lifted out the old-fashioned replica book inside. He flipped open the cover and held the page up so she could see her awkwardly scrawled handwriting, which she had taught herself to do from history files.
She knew what it said without reading it. She let her gaze skim over the stiff phrase.
Dear Lincoln. Happy birthday. D.
“He was furious when I gave it to him,” Devin said. “He raged about the indiscretion, that the data files would show what I had printed. We were supposed to be just this fun thing. No hassles, no commitments. Nothing. So I told him to recycle the book, that I was simply acknowledging his arrival day and didn’t care what he did with it later. That’s what I thought he did—recycle it, I mean. He didn’t talk about it ever again. He didn’t thank me. And I never gave him anything else.”
Adam put the book back in the box. Carefully. “He kept it, after all.” He put the lid on it.
“Why would he do that?” Devin whispered, her heart thudding unhappily.
“Everything else with any sort of value that wasn’t an immediate necessity in his life he got rid of. Yet he kept this.” Adam put his hand on the box. “Lincoln wasn’t the sentimental sort, Devin. This meant more to him than he ever letanyoneknow. Even you.”
She stared at the box. “He never said anything.”
“Saying something wasn’t the deal,” Adam pointed out.
“I don’t understand,” she protested. “How could he not say anything? How could I notknow?” For that was what rubbed. If he really had held any feelings for her at all, then she should have known. She should have been sensitive enough to suspect that he was holding something back. “I should have paid more attention,” she whispered, staring at the hateful box.
