“And you never noticed any indication of her talent?” Jasra ventured.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I replied as I began to realize why things were as they were. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

… Like that time at Baskin-Robbins when she caused a change of flavors ’twixt cone and lip. Or the storm she’d stayed dry in without an umbrella…

She frowned a puzzled frown and narrowed her eyes as she stared. “I don’t understand,” she said. “If you knew, you could have trained her yourself: She was in love with you. You would have been a formidable team.”

I writhed internally She was right, and I had suspected, had probably even known, but I’d been suppressing it. I’d possibly even triggered its onset myself, with that shadow walk, with my body energies…

“It’s tricky,” I said, “and very personal.”

“Oh. Matters of the heart are either very simple or totally inscrutable to me,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.”

“Let’s stipulate simple,” I told her. “We were already breaking up when I noticed the signs, and I’d no desire to call up the power in an ex-lover who might one day want to practice on me.”

“Understandable,” Jasra said. “Very. And ironic in the extreme.”

“Indeed,” Mandor observed, and with a gesture he caused more steaming dishes to appear before us. “Before you get carried away with a narrative of intrigue and the underside of the psyche, I’d like you to try a little breast of quail drowned in Mouton Rothschild, with a bit of wild rice and a few amusing asparagus tips.”

I had driven her to her studies by showing her another layer of reality, I realized. And I had driven her away from me because I had not really trusted her enough to tell her the truth about myself. I suppose this said something about my capacity for love as well as trust. But I had felt this all along. There was something else. There was more…