Seth was coming for them in the morning. The thing was over enough that three people could drive down a mountain in a truck without anyone caring which three.
Samantha spent the last of the light splitting the rest of Doug’s kindling because it felt wrong to leave his box empty. Inside, Marcus had the stove going and was making the last of the oatmeal into something with the last of the raisins. Vlad was in Doug’s chair with the tablet dark on his knee, between windows.
She came in and set the kindling by the stove and sat on the milk crate, because Marcus had the couch and his foot.
“The council goes Tuesday,” Marcus said. “Eleanor’s the face. I’m going to go help, after. Off camera.”
“I heard,” Samantha said. She had read his copy of the email to Eleanor. She thought it was the best thing she had ever watched him do and she wasn’t going to say so, because he knew, and saying it would make it smaller.
“You think it was right,” Vlad said. He wasn’t asking Marcus. He was asking her. She could sense that he had been working up to it for two days, around the edges of the windows, and now it was the last night and he was going to say it.
“I think it was the only thing that wasn’t a lie,” Samantha said. “Everybody who could fix something got what they needed to fix it. The same day. Not when some room decided they were allowed to know.”
“And the hospital.”
“I didn’t get it completely right.” She didn’t look away from him. “I put that on the list a day late and somebody died a day early. I’m going to have that for the rest of my life. It doesn’t make the rest of it wrong.”
“It makes it not free,” Vlad said. “You keep saying it like the price was a surprise. You knew the price before you sent it. You told me. A traffic light with a kid in the car. You sent it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“That is the part I cannot understand. Not that you were wrong. That you knew the implication and you still did it.”
“There wasn’t a version where nobody paid,” Samantha said. “There was a version where we picked who, in a room, slowly, and I don’t trust the room and neither do you. You just trust it more than you trust me doing it fast.”
Vlad didn’t answer that right away, which for him was the same as a long speech.
“I trust you more than the room,” he said finally. “I think you were still wrong. Both of those are true.”
Marcus stirred the pot. “I’m not going to tell you who’s right,” he said. “I used to think my whole job was to be the guy who decided that. Turns out my job is the part after, where somebody has to call a bunch of vendors and be boring at them until they do something. I’m good at that. I’m going to go do that.” He tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. “You two can keep debating this. I’ve got calls to make.”
Samantha almost smiled. She loved that he was able to wrap their struggle in a joke. She wanted to do this, to make Vlad laugh, but she just didn’t know how.
The tablet lit on Vlad’s knee. The ten o’clock window.
He got up without a word and took the case and went out to the rail. Through the door Samantha watched him set the dish on its spot and plug it in and sit down in the cold with the tablet, pulling the list, checking the doors, the way he was going to do every two hours for years because he didn’t trust anyone else to do it. He had told her she was wrong and then he had gone out to spend the rest of his life cleaning up after the thing he thought was wrong.
“He’s going to do that forever,” Marcus said quietly, watching Vlad through the door.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to be okay. With him thinking that.”
Samantha thought about it, because he deserved a real answer and so did she.
“He’s not going to move and neither am I,” she said. “We’re both going to think the same thing about this in ten years that we think tonight.” She watched Vlad’s back out on the rail. “I can live with that. I’d rather have him next to me being wrong about me than agreeing with me from across the country.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about him.”
“Don’t tell him.”
Cooper got up off the floor and went to the door and whined to be let out to Vlad. Samantha opened it. The cold came in and the dog went out and lay down on the porch boards next to the chair where Vlad was working, and Vlad reached down without looking and put a hand on him.
She stood in the doorway. The world was going to be ok. She could see it in the numbers coming down the dish, more systems back on safe keys every day than went down in the night, the gap widening in the right direction. It had cost a person she would never meet and it had cost her the one thing she’d built. It also cost the three of them deciding together, which was gone and not coming back.
“Oatmeal’s ready,” Marcus said. “It’s terrible. I used the last raisins.”
“Give me some,” Samantha said, and she closed the door against the cold with Vlad and Cooper still outside. She sat back down on the crate to eat the last bad meal in the cabin with one of the two people she had done this with, while the other one watched the doors.