"What do you want to do for the rest of tonight? --'Go hang out by myself' is fine."

"I do occasionally enjoy hanging out by myself! I tend to be good on that front after ten hours, though. I'm up for whatever."

Then there shall be more movies! And not cuddles. 

More movies and not cuddles sounds good! 

Later she can call Connor and tell him that she... has a new job in a different city and since it's summer it'll hopefully not be hugely disruptive if he and Zana move out here in a couple weeks. Not like right-right now, but in a bit. Maybe.

The next day she will... wander around the library and mildly regret not asking whether there are, like, specific times when she should be sure to be in the house or something. She's sort of mildly unclear what her situation is but Lev is probably not the sort of person who would expect her to stay in his house at all hours of the day. Probably. So... library.

Lev is spending all day thinking about tuberculosis!

It does not occur to him that Karen might think she needs his permission to go somewhere.

This is good, because it would probably shake his confidence in her ability to take care of herself without him having to think about it or go to any trouble. Really it's already ridiculous to think that scooping someone out of not-quite-poverty and saving their niece and giving them the chance to do stuff they'd have liked to do anyway, if they'd ever had time, is the sort of thing that makes sense to think of as a job and not an ill-considered charity project, but she would like to avoid being extra inconvenient on top of the ways in which she's already sort of inconvenient by default. He doesn't need to care about forty thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand in medical costs, so all she has to do to stay here is - not be more inconvenient than not having her here. Probably.

She reads. She looks up churches in the area, because she is going to have to go to church at some point. She tries to figure out what school district the not-castle is in. She realizes that she has a bunch of free time with which to learn things now, and gets like halfway through the first lesson of an online Spanish course before she gets bored. She tries working on a novel but doesn't make any real progress. She'll probably go find Lev around dinnertime again, if he doesn't pry himself away from his work any sooner than that.

He doesn't but he sure is happy to see her when she shows up!

"Hi! What did you get up to today?" 

"Mostly reading! I tried starting a foreign language course but it turns out I don't have the patience for it right now. You?"

"Mostly reading about multidrug resistant tuberculosis, which I realize is the world's single most boring topic."

"Sounds sort of fascinating, honestly. Or at least like it would be if I had any of the foundational knowledge I'd probably need to understand it."

"I mean, if you want, I can teach you about the world's most stunningly boring topic, but I warn you it is in fact stunningly boring."

"No, no, if you've been bored all day then I'm sure I can fulfill my desire to read about the creation of new and improved horrifying diseases on my own time. - speaking of which, just wanted to check, are there specific times you're hoping for me to be around, besides evenings? In case I ever want to randomly go to the park or something."

Haha yes that was only moderately awkwardly shoehorned in, she's so good at this for someone who's actually incredibly terrible at it.

"I mean if you have somewhere to go in the evenings that's fine? You don't have to stop having a life now that you've moved in here. It might be nice to generally have an idea of what your schedule is so that if you're super-busy for a week I'm not like 'where is Karen, was she eaten by a bear?' --Okay, I think there was a misunderstanding about tuberculosis. I think it is super-interesting, I like teaching people things, I am worried that you would be bored because basically no one is interested in the things I'm interested in."

She sort of has in fact stopped having a life, because her existing life is in a really different place. Also a schedule, because all of her previously scheduled activities are happening across the country from here. She can't think of a way to say this that doesn't sound like she's complaining, so she skips it.

"It doesn't sound like a boring topic, if you want to explain it, and then in the future I'll have a better sense of how right or terribly wrong you probably are when you declare things super interesting or stunningly boring. I will try not to expect it to be as interesting as other terrifying diseases, so I'm not too disappointed."

"...Wait, your entire life is in St. Louis, isn't it. Shit, I'm sorry."

"- yeah. Yeah it is a little bit. But it wasn't the most stunningly exciting life ever, I can probably whip up a different one. Just don't have one ready to go right this second."

"I feel like a terrible person for leaving you to be bored all day!"

"I think you may be confused about what boredom is. Some people think it's a nice thing to occasionally stop working twelve-hour days to catch up on their reading instead. It's - not what I'm going to spend my life doing, but two days of reading is not exactly a hardship."

"That's good! --If I can help you get more of a life here, I want to do that. I guess if your kids move in that will help."

"Probably! I might end up just being a full-time caretaker for Zana. Or - possibly get a job of some kind, unless you think that would look really weird to any hypothetical observers who might be observing. But maybe I won't have time anyway." Given that she's sort of lost her entire real-life support network and with it all of the people who could watch Zana during the day, so that's fun. Lev could probably hire someone but that would require asking Lev to hire someone, which would be sort of a weird thing to ask Lev to do just so that she can go out and probably be paid less money for whatever she could possibly do out of the house.

"I'm not the famous kind of billionaire. No one cares what I'm up to. If you want to work in a library or something that is totally doable. But we'd probably have to get Zana a nanny unless she goes to preschool?"

"Yeah, see, and that just seems sort of silly, given that you'd probably have to pay someone more to watch her than I'd get from working anyway. - not that that probably matters to you, I guess. I might not actually know how to judge the practicality of various options when money isn't supposed to be a consideration."

She doesn't even actually know whether money is supposed to be a consideration. It's not her money.

"Lots of people would go crazy without having a job. I would. And I don't think it's crazy to want to avoid a big resume gap that you'd have to explain away as the time an eccentric billionaire paid you to live in his house and talk to him about comic books."

"Yeah, I was going to bring that up, and then I realized that all the jobs I'm qualified for are not the sorts of jobs where people care about resume gaps anyway. But the going crazy might be a - minor consideration."

"I like you! I don't want you to go crazy."