Star Wars - Kenobi

about me, either,” Ben said, walking toward the eopies.
    “You’re the expert on what I think?” She smiled warmly. “Well, that’s proof right there that something’s happening between us. Orrin’s known me my whole life and doesn’t know what I think. You’ve met me a handful of times and you can read my mind.” Her eyes sparkled in the evening light. “Often. So either you’re superhumanly perceptive, Ben—or I’ve had your complete attention.”
    Ben took Rooh’s lead and walked her to the corral. Her wobbly child followed. “Annileen, I think you have a good home, a lovely family, and a successful business. And I think you are bored out of your mind.”
    She looked at him, incredulous. “You think I’m that simple?”
    “No,” he said, lifting the kid over the fencing. “I think you’re that complicated .”
    Annileen crossed her arms. “You think poor little Annie gets bored with Tatooine, and the first time a stranger from offworld comes along, it’s off to the races?”
    “Others have done it.”
    “Well, you’re wrong.”
    He looked back at her. “Honestly? You’re not bored?”
    Annileen turned and kicked the coolant unit with a clang. “I’m too tired to be bored! I’ve got a home that’s falling apart because I’m dead every evening. Half the time, I fall asleep at the kitchen table. My kids keep trying to find new ways to kill themselves, as if this place weren’t dangerous enough. And my business —” She sputtered as she stormed toward the corral. “My business is playing mother bantha to a herd of full-grown orphans! People are not flying to the Rim to trade places with old Annileen.”
    “I know some who would,” Ben said, his back leaning at the fence.
    She glared at him.
    He began to say something and stopped. For a moment, there was only the sound of the baby eopie, nuzzling his mother.
    At last, Ben spoke again. “Annileen … I think you’ve learned to live with these things. But you can’t pretend anymore that they challenge you. There’s too much to you.” Turning, he placed both hands on the fence railing and looked out onto the desert. “You’ve reached your limit, and you’re looking for a lifeline. And since you think you can’t move, you’re desperate for someone to come along and keep you company in that world. Someone who challenges you.”
    “I don’t know,” Annileen said, joining him at the fence. “Erbaly Nap’tee is pretty challenging.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    She looked down at the eopies and sighed. She did know what he meant. “You’re telling me that you don’t escape a trap by luring someone else in.”
    “Every trap has multiple ways out,” Ben said. “I saw that just today.”
    Annileen thought that a strange comment, but he changed the subject. “Besides,” he said, “I’d make a terrible shopkeeper.”
    “You can barely shop right,” she said.
    They laughed.
    Ben started to move from the fence when she touched his arm—less insistently this time. “Wait,” she said. “You’re not going to get away that easily. This isn’t just about me,” she said. “This is about you.”
    He put up his hand again. “I told you, I not looking for a—”
    “No,” Annileen said. “Not that. I asked you outside the Claim that day if something bad had happened to you. You said it happened to someone else.”
    “Yes.”
    She grabbed his wrist. “You’re a liar.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You’re lying to yourself. This thing, this bad thing—it may have happened to someone else. Someone you cared about, I’m guessing. And that means it happened to you, too.”
    Ben resisted. “I don’t—”
    “Yes, you do. Something horrible happened, Ben, and it’s ripping you apart. Maybe it’s why you’re here. But you’re trying to go on like you didn’t care, like you weren’t—”
    She paused. His hands back on the railing, he looked up at her.
    “You were there ,” Annileen whispered. “Weren’t you? When this bad thing happened,” she mouthed. “You were there.”
    Ben closed his eyes and nodded. “It didn’t just happen,” he said, hardly breathing. “I caused it.”
    Annileen’s mind raced. Raced and veered into dark imaginings that she wanted to dismiss. But Ben was serious about whatever it was, and she had to be, too. “You … you hurt someone?”
    “They hurt themselves,” Ben said. “I came along at the end—the very end. But I was also there at the beginning. I should have