I didn't find out about this part until much later, but after Tyr left me there was a brief conversation outside my door that I wasn't privy to at the time.

“Thanks for arranging this, faceless,” Tyr said to my “doctor.”

“I knew this case in particular interested you,” Kestrel said, her face expressionless but her voice soft with fondness if you knew what to listen for.

“They all interest me,” Tyr answered. He said that with a smile, but his tone was firm.

“I know, Erik,” Kestrel replied with a small smile of her own, and this time you could hear the fondness in her voice. “You wouldn't be you if they didn't.”

*****

After that, things didn't change for me overnight, of course. It was more like six months, which doesn't sound like that long until you've lived it in an institution.

“Thanks for everything, doc,” I said to her, and I meant it. I even shook her hand. “I know it's not really freedom, just a halfway house, but it's halfway to recovery, right?”

“Indeed,” she said with a nod. “The path to recovery that lies before you is arduous at best, but you have the means to prevail; never forget that.”

“I won't,” I said with a smile.

She tilted her head ever so slightly, a mannerism I'd come to recognize as what passed for an expression of extreme curiosity from her. “May I ask you one question before we part ways?”

“Shoot.”

“You told me that Tyr answered your question, but not what he said.”

I think she'd been avoiding asking me questions for so long that it'd become a habit for her, and I almost teased her about that not actually being a question. But since I owed her a lot, I decided against it.

Besides, I'm not sure she would have gotten it if I did try to tease her.

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