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Winter doesn't really know why she goes to the station.
After the vote, after watching Grace betray everything she claimed to believe in - everything she made Winter believe in - this is the last place she should want to be. What is it now but a symbol of cracked faith, a failed intuition felled by superstition? A mocking reminder of just how far removed St. Jory is from the rest of the world, governed by its own laws and tradition, touched but never changed by the world surrounding it?
Winter loves the island, it is hers and she is its, but for the first time she wishes that the wanderlust that infects all the young people eventually had actually found her, had planted roots deep in her heart and sprouted into the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else.
If she had, she wouldn't be here, now, heart broken, weighted down by twin losses - knowing the truth is like losing Kai all over again, ripping open wounds she'd long thought healed, but worse than that is the sounds she can hear as she steps inside the station itself, the slamming of drawers and muffled cursing of a woman who had seemed at times to shine, her belief in the power of the system a beacon for Winter's confused heart. Her big, dark eyes muted by the lack of it, by the lawlessness that lives wild on St. Jory's shores.
She is going to leave. Winter knows this like she knows her own name, and it cuts deeper than any loss that came before.
She's going to lose this woman before she's really had a chance to have her, and if she hates the True Way for anything, it's that.
As if sensing her presence, Grace looks up from where she has settled, hands on her desk and head bowed. Her lovely eyes catch on Winter's for the barest second before they slip away. Defeated.
"Come to yell at me, then?" she asks, and shakes her head. "There's nothing you can say that I haven't told myself, but I was wrong. I've always been wrong."
Winter shakes her head. "No, you-" she starts, only to be cut off by a bitter laugh.
"I have been, though. I thought I was doing what was right, that an imperfect system was still better than none, but what has that gotten me? Disgraced, sent away like a naughty child. Treated with suspicion and disdain, ignored, maneuvered. And now this." She shakes her head, then meets Winter's eyes, her own wide and filled with a horrible helplessness that makes Winter want nothing more than to enfold her in her arms. To hold her and soothe her and put her back together as best she can, however long that takes. But when she steps forward, Grace steps back, and she stops, stung.
"Do you know why I voted the way I did?" Grace asks, voice bleak. "Because I realized it doesn't matter. Nothing does. Not here, not anywhere. People will do what they like and no law will stop them. I was a fool to think that I had any control."
"Grace," Winter says. She steps forward again, and this time Grace doesn't back away. She stands there, shoulders slumped with the weight of her loss, and allows Winter to draw close, draw her in. Her body is rigid, at first, stiff with rejection, but when Winter only pulls her closer she relaxes incrementally, allows her head to drop on Winter's shoulder.
From Grace, that's practically melting.
"I've got you," Winter whispers. I love you. I love you so much. Don't go.
It's not the right time for those words just yet. But someday.
Soon.