The pack is at dinner.
No crisis. No agenda. Just the facility schedule and the fact of all of them being in the same building and ending up at the same table. Leo across from me, performing normalcy at roughly forty percent above what's required. Jake and Jim side by side, the ease between them something I watch because it's good and I don't have many things that are straightforwardly good right now.
Dalton is at the door.
Not at the table — at the door, doing his job, notepad in hand, monitoring. The line between staff and residents drawn in the geography of the room. But he's watching the table the way he watches things that matter to him, and I notice that too.
RJ is not here.
The space where he would be is present the way absences are present — not empty, occupied by the awareness of what's missing. Nobody looks at it directly. Everyone knows.
I look at my tray and decide to be here anyway. Montana is not tonight. The board review is not tonight. Tonight there is chicken that is approximately edible and Leo already stealing from Torres's plate before Torres has sat down.
"Hey, that's mine," Torres says.
"It was yours," Leo says. "It has now been liberated."
"Put it back."
"I have already committed emotionally."
Torres tries to steal it back, but Leo blocks him without looking, which is physically impressive.
Jim watches this happen with the patient attention he gives everything — waiting to see where it ends up. "Done?"
"For now," Leo says.
Jake, beside him, has been watching this exchange with the expression of a man who has been around Leo long enough to know exactly how that was going to end. His jaw does the thing where it's almost a smile but doesn't commit to anything.
I catch it.
He catches me catching it.
We both look back at our food.
"So," Torres says, to the general table. "Today."
"Today," Leo agrees pleasantly.
"The table thing."
"The table thing," Leo agrees again, with the same pleasant energy, which gives absolutely nothing.
Torres looks at me. Then at the table I am currently eating at. Then back at me, with the expression of a man doing the math on whether to say the thing he's thinking.
He says it anyway. "I may have — briefly, not for long — been slightly concerned when you got up there."
"Concerned," I say.
"Concerned." He's very committed to this word. "In a completely normal way."
"Torres," Leo says, leaning forward with the expression of someone about to offer genuine comfort, "you can say scared. This is a safe space."
"I was not scared."
"Jake," Leo says, "was Torres scared?"
Jake, without looking up from his food: "Very."
