Nest shook her head doubtfully. “To talk with you. To tell you something you probably already know. I’m not sure.” She looked away from him, out over the water. “The truth is, I came because I don’t want to hear later that something bad has happened to you and find myself wishing I’d tried to prevent it.”
He grinned cautiously. “What is it you think might happen?”
She sighed. “Let me start at the beginning, all right? Let me tell it my way, maybe work up to the part about what might happen. I’m not really sure about any of this myself. Maybe you can fill in the gaps for me. Maybe you can even persuade me I came here for no better reason than to see you again. That would be all right.”
She told him then about Ariel’s appearance in the park two days earlier, the tatterdemalionis purpose in coming as a messenger, and the Lady’s request that Nest come to Seattle to find him in the hope he might heed her warning that his life was in peril.
Nest paused. “So I gather you’ve already been told that you’re in same kind of danger.”
He seemed to consider the statement, to weigh it in a way she didn’t understand. Then he nodded. I’ve been told. I don’t know that any warning is necessary.”
She shrugged. I don’t know that it is, either. But here I am, delivering the message anyway. I guess you don’t have any concerns about it, huh?”
He smiled unexpectedly. “Nest, let me tell you what happened at San Sobel!
And he did so, retelling the story from his perspective, recounting it carefully and thoroughly, obviously trying to make her understand how terrible it was for him, to help her see why he had been unable to continue as a Knight of the Word. She listened attentively, for he kept his voice low and his words shielded from the people eating around them, pausing once when he came to the aftermath of the killings to gather his thoughts so that he could relate clearly what the experience had done to his psyche, pausing a second time when the bowls of clam chowder arrived and the waitress was standing over them.
At the conclusion of his tale, he told her something he had never been able to tell anyone. He told her how dose to suicide he had been when he realized the fault might be his. He had managed to get past that, but only by determining he could never revisit that place in his mind, could never again put himself in a position where he might have to hold himself responsible for people dying.
Nest let him finish, then shook her head doubtfully. “If you do nothing, people die anyway, John. What would have happened to me if you hadn’t come to Hopewell? “I don’t know that you can say any of it is your fault.”
“It feels like it is. That’s enough.” He looked down at the soup cooling before him. He hadn’t eaten a bite. “I don’t mean to argue with you on this, but you can’t know what it’s like if you’re not me. You don’t have to live with the dreams. You don’t have to live with the responsibility for what happens if they come true.” He shook his head. “It’s a special kind of hell.”
“I know.” she said. “I wouldn’t even try to put myself in your shoes. I wouldn’t presume.”
She finished her soup. All the bad feelings she had experienced at Fresh Start had evaporated. and she found herself hungrier than expected.
“I drifted afterward, looking for something to do, some place to be, a reason for being alive.” Ross began to eat a little. “Then I found Stef, and everything changed. She gave me back what I had lost at San Sobel. Or maybe last even before that. She made me feel good about something again. So here we are, working at Fresh Start with the Wizard of Oz, and doing something important. I don’t want to go back to what I was. Let’s face it; I can’t go back. How could I? It would change everything.”