POV: wayne
Summary
Wayne follows MeLaan across the entry hall of Ladrian Mansion toward one of the small private sitting rooms. He swipes for his lucky hat on the peg outside the door and misses it; he is going to have to face this without a hat on. Inside, she sits him in an overstuffed chair that makes him feel about Max's age, then crouches in front of him and takes his hand.
She tells him she has to leave. Today. It is over. She had wanted to prepare him for it, but stringing it out had probably only made it worse. He answers with the shape of a joke — never had his heart broke before, doesn't have the experience — and she winces. He waves it off. A fellow who dates an immortal agent of God himself is not entitled to be surprised when, one day, he comes second to the one who glows. *Does He glow?* MeLaan does not engage.
She had hoped, she tells him, that there would be fewer attachments with Wayne than with most. *Where'd you get that idea,* he says, *I attach to all sorts of things what don't belong to me.* She grimaces. *Was it nothing to you, then. Six years.* It wasn't nothing, she tells him; it just wasn't the same to her as it was to him. TenSoon had warned her. Ulaam had warned her. Mortals see time differently. They told her.
She had asked for the mission, she admits. Because she had realised she was leading him on, and the longer she let it go the more painful the break would be. That is why she will not stay even to help with Marasi's sting — if she stayed it would be a lie, staying because she did not want to hurt him rather than because she wanted to. He almost asks her to stay anyway. He holds his tongue. Sometimes, Wayne thinks, you just have to stand there and take the shot.
She lifts in the kandra's wonder of the cosmere she is being given — the *dark vastness Harmony calls Shadesmar*; whole worlds she has only imagined; whole peoples she gets to help. He nods dully. She leans in and kisses him one long last time, with a kandra's tongue. As she pulls away she tells him she did want to leave him with something important. *Yeah?* *You,* she says, squeezing his hand, *were a really good lay, Wayne. The best I've known.* Seven hundred years old, and he was the best. Well now. That was something indeed. *Thanks,* he says. *That was sweet of you to tell me. It helps.* She thought it might. She lets go of his hand and walks out. She will send someone, knowing her, to box up the other bodies she keeps here; she will take the emerald and the aluminum on the mission and leave the rest.
He sits a long time staring at the door. He is not wearing a hat, which means he just has to be himself — the true him, the one who knows this pain. They have ridden many dusty paths together. The pain has been his invisible friend since childhood. The pain of knowing what he really is. The pain of being worthless.