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“I loved you,” he said, choked.
    “You should quit smoking.” My voice was tart.
    “I did.”
    “Not this lifetime.”
    “I never started this lifetime. Celeste—”
    “I loved you too,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.
    Phil was quiet a long time. I watched the hairless little hollow where his collarbones met and tried to remember what the big deal was about peanut butter.
    “I’m sorry you had to see that, Ren.” Phil stood up and walked to the bedroom’s little window. He shoved the curtains back and looked into the yard like it’d better not have anything to say about it.
    “Maybe we should go with pizza,” I said.
    He looked back suddenly and caught me testing the skin of my lips for razor burn.
    “I’m sorry about that too,” he said, very quietly.
    I shrugged and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Will Celeste keep doing that?” I asked him. “Just talking out of my mouth that way? She’s kind of long-winded.”
    Phil’s face ran through a range of emotions. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “Do you want her to?”
    He held his hands out and I took them. I stood up slowly, but it still ground the headache tighter.
    “Pepperoni or Deluxe?” he said.
    Phil
    You’re always sleepy and hungry as a new Second; you’re always sleepy and jumpy as a new titan. Ren managed some pizza and then fell asleep. I opened my laptop, disposed of email, and seeded the ritual, leaving it as a bright blue flower in a vase just inside the front gate. I looked around while I was there; a knee-high statue of Iupiter stood next to a full-size brick oven, and on top of the oven was a basket holding six loaves of bread; and just past that were three coils of hemp, followed by nine or ten candles. I didn’t bother looking in the other direction; I was going to need to clean the place up or I’d be unable to graze my own Garden.
    Not now, though. Now I had to deal with a new Second, and, dammit, I was missing all the WSOP side action. I’d expected to do the interview, then leave Ren to think about it for a week or two.
    I leaned against the wall that existed in my mind and rubbed a virtual hand over a symbolic cheek. Why hadn’t she had to think about it? I walked over to the oven and grabbed the second loaf, ripped off a hunk, and started eating it. The loaf remained in the basket because that’s how things work. I swallowed, and the memory became part of me and I examined it.
    She’d been one of those precocious children who pronounce words wrong because she’d read them before hearing them, but it had bothered her more than most, and as a teenager she’d taken to reading with an online dictionary open so she could hear the pronunciation of words she didn’t know. Interesting, but so?
    I bit into the next loaf of bread and recalled how she’d gotten into user interface, and how angry she got over poor design, and realized that she took bad design as a personal insult directed at everyone who used it. Again, interesting, but so?
    I continued, and got nothing; but, as so often happens, the accumulation of little things built up an obvious answer so gradually that it had been sitting in front of me for some time before I realized it: She hadn’t hesitated, because there was something she wanted to do. She had an agenda I hadn’t seen.
    And I was her titan—responsible for her and it, whatever it was.
    Crap.
    I let the Garden dissolve around me and there I was, shaking and in desperate need of the pizza that was all the way across the room. According to the clock on my laptop, I’d spent more than two hours grazing.
    I ate cold pizza, then threw myself onto the couch.
    I was going to have a lot to talk to Ren about when she woke up.
    Ren
    I woke up happy, with the heavy-boned tired you get from swimming all afternoon in a summer lake. Easy, and not wanting to hurry back to the real world—whatever that means when half my work and all my correspondence exist only electronically. After pizza,