Malcolm tightened his hand around hers standing there in the rain with the old railard stretched out silent behind them and told her that made them even. "Not even," she corrected him again. And when he asked why, her answer came without any hesitation left in it at all. "Because you saved my life," she said simply.
"And I intend to spend the rest of it making certain you never once regret that you did." They stood there a while longer, letting the rain soak through jackets. Neither of them bothered to fasten, in no particular hurry to reach wherever they were supposedly walking. Somewhere behind them, a freight signal clicked over from red to green. An old habit of the system Malcolm had spent years maintaining, indifferent to whatever had happened to the two people standing near its rails.
He found himself thinking, not for the first time since that first night, that there was something fitting about beginning a life with someone in the same place. A life had nearly ended. Viven seemed to be thinking something similar, her eyes tracing the dark shapes of the old signal towers rising against the clouded sky, and neither of them felt any need to fill the quiet with more words than it already held. When they finally did start walking again, it was without any particular destination in mind. content simply to let the evening carry them wherever it wanted to go.
Malcolm thought briefly of the jacket still hanging in his closet, folded the same way he had folded it the night he set it on the hood of his truck, and understood now that he would probably never throw it away. Some objects earned the right to stay, not because of what they were, but because of what they had witnessed. Vivienne slipped her arm through his as they walked, matching her pace to his without either of them remarking on it. and the railard slowly disappeared behind them into the dark and the rain. Two people who had started as strangers on a set of tracks and had somehow, against every reasonable expectation, found their way into something neither one of them was in any hurry to If