In context, now, those moments of requests on Gwenaëlle's part that perhaps have seemed capricious or unnecessary: won't he read this to her while she's working, won't he teach her this thirty year old card game that she read a reference to and thinks he might know of, has he got time to take some dictation for someone in the library, could he cross-reference this for her, can he look at her figures. More often than she's asking him to accompany her to the alienage to retrieve a former comrade, she is trying to find him what she privately thinks of as sitting down tasks, anxious that he might treat retirement a little more like he's actually fucking retired, and try this salve she's mixed from a recipe in the infirmary for his joints—

He'd have died for her father, and then her father had died.

“Felix,” she says, thwarted in her objection by Stephen's own correction, “it's— Felix Guilfoyle.” It feels sort of strange in her mouth, like an impertinent intimacy that she's taking with someone who has seen her highs and lows but always from the impassive remove of servitude. (It strikes her in retrospect, how Mhavos had never entirely relaxed around her; the chasm between herself and Guilfoyle, and how much further it feels when he has been so much closer, and how little she even knows if she entirely wants to bridge it. The way that it had felt when his grief had been perceptible and to admit how far away hers had felt requires first admitting that she had any.)

“I worry about him doing too much,” she admits, “but he doesn't listen to me if I approach it like that.”