"I didn't want to be useful to power," she said. "I wanted to be useful to people who don't have access to it. Water distribution. Housing. The things that everyone needs and that consistently get worse the less politically connected you are." She looked at her hands. "My father built his whole career on leveraging power. I understand the leverage. I wanted to use that understanding on the other side."
"Did you love him?" Arjun asked. He asked it carefully, just the question, open.
She was quiet for a long time. "I thought so," she said finally. "Looking back — I think I loved the version of him that was in my head. Which is a different kind of loneliness from not loving someone at all. You're alone in the relationship without knowing it until you know it." She paused. "When I found the accounts and he lied, I was more angry than heartbroken. Which told me something about what I had actually been feeling all along."
"Get some sleep," he said, after a while. "I'll be here."
She looked at him. "I know," she said. Something in the way she said it made it about more than tonight. He was going to be professional about that. He was absolutely going to be professional about that.
She went back to the bedroom. He kept watch. The night was uneventful, which was what he had wanted and exactly what he got. Uneventful nights were not boring — they were successful.
