A Name She Didn't Know

"Morgan isn't your name," Amélie said, not for the first time, watching him across the small table where they'd taken to meeting when circumstance allowed it.

"No."

"Will you tell me your real one?"

"No," he said again, and had the grace to look sorry about it rather than simply amused, which was the only reason she hadn't ended the conversation, and possibly the acquaintance, the first time he'd refused her the same question three months earlier.

She turned her cup in her hands. "Then what exactly am I supposed to be in love with? A name you invented, or whoever's actually wearing it?"

"I'd hoped it was the second one."

"You'd hoped. That's not much of an answer for a man asking a woman to trust him with rather a lot."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might simply let the question stand unanswered, the way he let most of her harder questions stand. "I can't give you the name," he said finally. "It isn't mine to give away carelessly, not now, not to anyone, however much I'd like to make an exception. What I can tell you is that everything else — the things you've actually watched me do, these three months — that's truly mine. The name is the only borrowed thing about me."

"That's a very convenient thing for a liar to say."

"It is. I'd say it whether it were true or not, which I recognize doesn't help you much." He met her eyes. "I can only offer you three months of watching, and ask whether three months was long enough to tell the difference."

She thought about it honestly, turning the cup again. Three months of a man who'd once given his own coat to a stranger's freezing child without a second thought, who made her laugh at things she hadn't expected to find funny, who'd never once, in all that time, asked her for anything beyond her company. Three months was not nothing. She wasn't certain, sitting there, that it was enough. But she found, examining her own feelings as honestly as she could manage, that she believed the conduct considerably more than she'd have believed any speech.

What troubled her more, once she let herself look at it, wasn't the name at all. It was the bruise along his jaw two weeks ago that he'd explained away with a story about a fall from a horse that didn't quite match the shape of the mark. It was the way he sometimes vanished for a week and returned changed in some small way she couldn't name. It was, she realized, sitting very still at that small table, an accumulating pile of details she had been quietly declining to add up.

"You're in danger," she said. Not a question this time.

"Sometimes."

"The kind of danger my brother is paid to hunt down."

He didn't answer that one at all, which was, in its own way, exactly the answer.

Amélie sat with that for a long moment, watching a man whose real name she still didn't know, whose actual danger she'd just named aloud for the first time, and whose company she found she was no more willing to give up now than she had been three months, one borrowed name, and one unexplained bruise ago.