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good.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “I’d rather not.”
    “You were thinking about the fight with Wilson.”
    Hicks said nothing.
    “I was afraid for you. He was enormous. I thought he would snap you like a twig.”
    “He’s an idiot. All brute strength. Doesn’t know the first thing about fighting. If he had, I might have been in trouble.”
    “When I saw what you did to him I was surprised, and kind of turned on.”
    Hicks raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
    Miranda smiled. “Then I got to thinking, where did he learn how to do that?”
    Hicks lowered his eyes again, suddenly finding the rippling surface of his drink interesting.
    “Don’t do that,” Miranda said.
    “What?”
    “Shut me out.”
    “I’m not shutting you out.”
    “I asked a question. Are you going to answer it?”
    Hicks spun his glass and sighed. “What difference does it make, Miranda? Can’t we just be who we are now and leave it at that?”
    “The other day when we were walking along the wall,” she said, “I looked at you in the afternoon light, and the sun cut through your eyes from the side, and they looked like stained glass floating in water, and I loved you so much I thought my heart would burst. Then you smiled at me with your mysterious little smile, and leaned over and kissed me, and that love rose through me like a fire and burned me up inside, and I wished in that moment I had all the world to give you. If I could have, I would have reached up and given you the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and heaven, and Earth, and everything in between. Then we walked again, and I held your hand, and I thought about your hands, how big and strong and gentle they are, how your lightest touch can send me trembling like a schoolgirl with her first crush, and how I watched you use those same hands to beat a three-hundred pound ex-football player senseless. I realized, then, that I want to know you. Not just who you are now, but all of you, and everything you were before. I’m in love with this handsome, quiet, sincere man who treats me with so much kindness, and dignity, and gentleness, and love, and he’s the most dangerous man I know.”
    Hicks remained silent.
    Miranda reached out and took his hand away from the glass. “What’s going on in there, Caleb? How are things supposed to work between us if you won’t open up?”
    Hicks pulled his hand away, suddenly angry. “Do I ask you about your life before the Outbreak? Do I grill you about your time with the Free Legion?”
    He regretted it even as he said it. Miranda’s expression grew brittle, sapphire eyes shimmering against her porcelain face. Her hands trembled as she clasped them together in her lap and dropped her gaze. “No,” she whispered.
    “I’m sorry, M. I shouldn’t have said that.”
    “You’re right. I have no right to pry.”
    Hicks closed his eyes, rested his elbows on the table, and put his head in his hands, frustrated.
    On one hand, he was in the right. Since the Outbreak, it was an unspoken rule you didn’t talk about life pre-Outbreak. You didn’t ask people what they did, or if they had families, or who they lost. If someone wanted to volunteer that information, that was fine, but it was impolite in the extreme to ask. The kind of thing that could easily start a fight. It reminded Hicks of how prison inmates weren’t supposed to ask each other what they were in for, or how war veterans hated talking about the war. He thought about the three million or so Americans who survived the Outbreak and how most of them suffered from PTSD in one form or another. An entire nation of prisoners and war veterans and victims.
    A nation in mourning.
    On the other hand, Miranda had just spoken one of the most heartfelt declarations of love he had ever heard, and he had thanked her with a proverbial slap in the face.
    I am a son of a bitch , he thought.
    “Miranda, I didn’t mean that. You have every right to ask. I just … I don’t know if I’m ready to talk