The rest of it came out, then. Beauty dashed tracks of relief/fury/relief from her face and straightened on the couch again. It wasn't all right, not at all. But Errol was alive -- and at work, in fact -- just as he should be. She held onto a steadying breath, then let it out in something more restrained than a sigh and softer than a groan.
It came to her, then, that John Preston was so new to the City that he hadn't yet discovered the impossible things here that she long ago accepted as fact. A part of her still wanted to throw this monster out and call Doctor Banner to help. She passed two fingertips across her eyes, drawing away the last of the wetness, and told herself to be reasonable.
The question he asked her... She would have smiled, in better circumstances. Now she felt defensive and still very angry. "Yes," she said. "When I was new here, he helped me find out what became of my family lines. He found me a job that I love. He saved me from someone who would have hurt me. Then, when someone did hurt me - it wasn't his fault and I didn't tell him until later - he's been looking out for me ever since. He's one of the best men I've ever known."
And that was saying nothing about the hours they spent reading together, either silently or bits and pieces out loud. That said nothing about the coffee and tea, the breakfasts, the lunchtime laughter, the long, companionable hours working without saying a word... and, sometimes, sometimes, the nights spent watching opera or dancing or having dinner together. These things she kept very close to her; they weren't for others to know.
And you killed him, her eyes said, though she kept the words away. What she did say, however, was:
"The City, this city</i>, is capable of many things. It must have brought Errol here before you..." Killed him. You killed him. "Before what you're remembering. We can't leave this place to go back home. The City needs us to live. But it also gives us everything we need, and the things it doesn't give, it gives us ways of earning. I've been here five years... almost five years. If you'd told me when I arrived that I would love it here, that I would call it 'home', I'd've laughed. But it is home, even with all its strangeness and wonder."