In the middle of all of this, Thoma fell in love.
This was, objectively, the worst possible timing, and Roman had told him so directly and Thoma had responded with the particular expression of a person who understood that their timing was terrible and was going to proceed anyway.
The object of Thoma's very sudden and extremely inconvenient feelings was Charles Lothkorv.
Charles Lothkorv was a 6 foot two, which put him four years ahead of Thoma. He was from a family with their fingers in certain private security circles that overlapped, tangentially, with the Vale network. He was also, by any objective measure, extremely attractive in a controlled, precise way that Thoma had apparently found completely overwhelming from the first time they had been in the same room.
"He looked at me," Thoma told Eli, sitting cross-legged on Eli's bedroom floor with the slightly dazed expression of someone who had sustained a minor head injury, "and I forgot how sentences worked."
