Even if it's raw and rubbing, all those thoughts, and the front of the house getting closer and closer, he's still glad she's actually there. Pushing and prodding, about as involved as she isn't at all. Caring enough to ask, but not enough to give any of the situations twenty questions. So he doesn't have to bang around in his head, with the lights off, over all these sudden stairs and pitfalls.

"It might be a steep price," Steve shot back, without much thought to it. He was lucky that she was. There. That she didn't mind at all getting out of the way, or falling in line with his other plans, that are so much more like work than they are like anything near leave-vacation this time.

He walks up stairs he walked up all his life -- except it wasn't all his life, because of -- and unlocks the door, only marginally give half a glance at the unused security system. That really should be used more. It's the whole reasons it's actually there. But, then, the house stood here for over thirty years before it had a system, too.

Tries a little not to pay attention to how much it would be so much easier to get into a physical altercation. How like running, he could throw his all into it, and he might be able to forget. To feel like he was doing something more useful that turning over ghosts. Delano dead in the morgue. Doris, gone, somewhere not far enough away she stopped being real. Wo Fat, and three bullets at his feet, but not his head.