What She Decided to Risk

Roland's name was the problem, not her own skin. Amélie understood that clearly enough once she let herself think it through properly, sitting up long past when she should have been asleep. Her brother hunted men exactly like the one she was in love with. If her attachment ever became more than a rumor, it wouldn't be her safety at stake first. It would be his career, his standing, everything he'd built serving the Republic's side of a fight her own heart had apparently decided to take the other side of.

She raised it with no one. Not Roland, certainly; she could imagine that conversation in miserable detail and had no wish to conduct it. Not even Morgan, at first, though she suspected, from the careful way he sometimes watched her across their meetings, that he'd already worked out the shape of the problem himself and was waiting to see what she'd do about it before he said anything.

"You could end it," he said finally, one evening, before she'd said a word about any of it. "I'd understand. Better than you might expect."

"Is that what you want?"

"No. But I'm not the one with a brother whose whole career could unravel over this."

She turned the idea over properly, for the first time, out loud rather than only in the privacy of her own sleepless hours. "If I end it, I keep Roland safe and I lose you. If I go on exactly as we have been, I keep you and I gamble with something that isn't only mine to gamble." She looked at him. "Neither of those is a choice I actually want to make."

"Then don't make either of them."

"There isn't a third option, unless you're about to surprise me."

"There might be a careful one. Fewer meetings. Better discretion than either of us has bothered with so far. Not safety — I won't promise you that — but less exposure than we've been carrying around like it cost nothing." He said this plainly, without trying to make it sound better than it was. "It isn't a solution. It's a smaller risk instead of a larger one."

She took the smaller risk. She told herself, walking home that night, that she was choosing caution, and she was honest enough with herself by the time she reached her own door to admit that what she was choosing was simply not losing him, dressed up in the more respectable language of prudence.

She never told Roland any of it: not the wager she was making with his career, not the careful new discretion, not the name she still didn't know. She carried the whole arrangement privately, and found, turning it over on the nights sleep wouldn't come, a small and uncomfortable irony in her own position: a woman troubled for months by a man's concealed name, now concealing considerably more from her own brother than Morgan had ever concealed from her.

She did not decide this made her wise. She decided only that it made her honest about what she actually wanted, which was Morgan, danger and all, more than she wanted the safer, simpler life a more careful sister might have chosen instead.