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the Wrights if I could work in the pub for room and board. They agreed.”
    “You’re seventeen! This is not only ridiculous, it’s super illegal.”
    “It’s possibly not the most super illegal thing a Lynburn has done this week,” Jared pointed out.
    It was so strange to Kami, how little she could read him. It was like coming to a door that she had always run through before, to find it locked and barred.
    “Why did you leave Aurimere?” Kami asked, her voice small.
    “My aunt Lillian made me an offer I had to refuse,” said Jared. He looked forbidding.
    Kami knew that expression, and remembered the feeling that used to go with it: he was unhappy. “So you ran away from home,” she said. “To become a tavern wench.”
    “I’m not a tavern wench,” said Jared. “That’s not a job.” His voice was slightly less stern than before, as if he was taken aback.
    “It sounds like you’re a tavern wench,” Kami told him. “Fleeing persecution, you have to take up a menial occupation to keep body and soul together. But at least it’s honest work, though as you labor, many predatory customers make advances and offer indignities.”
    “One can only hope,” Jared responded.
    Encouraged, Kami reached out a hand: Jared flinched away. He always did that. Kami didn’t know why she kept forgetting. “Jared. You realize the Wrights only agreed because you’re a Lynburn and they’re frightened of you.”
    A muscle in Jared’s jaw twitched. “What do you want me to do?”
    “Jared,” she said again, her voice softer. “If you needed help, you could have come to me. Don’t you know that?”
    Jared gave her that new look, winter-gray and cold, as if he hated her. “I wouldn’t come to you for anything. Not for any reason.”
    That stopped her. Jared turned away and opened the door to go back inside.
    “Wait,” said Kami. She didn’t have the chance to force her voice steady, and it was humiliatingly obvious she was on the point of tears. “If that’s how you feel, why set my branch on fire last night?” It was a dumb question. No matter how little he cared about her now, Jared was hardly going to let her die. She braced herself to hear as much.
    Jared stared at the door. “I thought you would like a weapon better than a rescue,” he told her, and ducked inside.
    Kami had to stay outside, because that did make her cry. If he still knew her that well, then how much he hated her hurt even more. He seemed like such a stranger, to the point where she wondered if it had been the link she loved, and never him at all. If she had never loved him, if it had all been the link, this shouldn’t hurt.
    She should be able to cut him out of her life, the same way he had her.
    Kami blotted her tears fiercely on her sleeve and went inside to collect her schoolbag. She did not spare Jared another glance.
    * * *
    After school Kami found her father making chocolate pasta in the kitchen. At this time of day, her mother was usually still working at Claire’s, the bakery and restaurant she owned, so her father tended to make dinner, but dinner rarely looked like this. “How is my best girl?” her father asked.
    Kami observed the concoction in the pan. “Considering moving out of home.”
    “I can’t say you’re not being provoked,” said Dad, and stirred in more chocolate. “But it is Ten’s revolting favorite, he’s been sick, and we’re having it for dinner, because eating the disgusting things a family member mysteriously craves is part of love and togetherness, and because I am lazy and have no clean pans to make other food.”
    “That is such a touching sentiment,” said Kami. “It gets me. Right here.”
    Her father laughed, then saw her expression and stopped. “Speaking of moving out of home,” he said, “I couldn’t help hearing about the Lynburn boy.”
    “He’s got nothing to do with me,” Kami said. “He wants nothing to do with me,” she added. Her throat went tight. “We were never