He felt slightly nauseous as he dragged his legs out of the bed and sat up. He wasn’t entirely sure why; he’d drunk little and eaten still less the night before, happy to sit and listen to Kristen offering scraps of her past history, almost incredulous that he could possibly be interested in it. And, in all honesty, it was a small life; a drunken father, early abandonment, drifting and scavenging. In terms of significant events, it wasn’t a footnote on a page. But she described people in ways that made their faces come alive in his mind’s eye and she seemed to lack even a shred of bitterness or malice. Even when dismissing someone with that back-of-the-throat hiss she had, it was to mark them as an individual to avoided for the sake of survival and never as an object of revenge or even a grudge.