The weight of everything is there — it's always there, Montana and the board and the clock running faster than it was yesterday — but I'm here. The food is good. The people around this table exist and are present and some of them are even laughing, which is a thing I didn't know how to want until I had it.
I didn't expect to want this.
I wanted individuals. I wanted these people — not a structure, not a constellation, not to be the center of something I didn't design. And yet the shape of it sits in my chest like something that was always going to be there, and that scares me more than any of the rest of it.
Not because it might fall apart.
Because it might not.
***
Afterward, while the table is clearing, I lean toward Leo.
"I miss Gray," I say. Quiet.
A sound from the door. Low. Almost nothing.
I glance over. Dalton is looking at his notepad but his mouth is doing something and he drags his thumb across his nose — the gesture I've seen a hundred times now, the one that is just him.
I turn back.
Jim is watching Dalton. Not the flicker I've seen before — a frown. Small, precise. The expression of someone filing something that doesn't fit the folder they put it in yet. He looks at me. Then at Jake. Then back at Dalton, who has recomposed himself entirely and is making a note in his notepad with the serene professionalism of someone who definitely was not just laughing at a resident.
Jim's frown deepens fractionally.
Jake, who has caught Jim's expression, raises his eyebrows in a question.
Jim shakes his head slightly. Goes back to his coffee.
I file it too.
***
Dalton falls into step beside me in the corridor on the way back.
I'm flanked — Dalton on one side, Leo on the other, which Leo has arranged through the quiet mechanics of positioning that he executes with such casual ease I never notice him doing it until it's done. Leo is humming something. It is designed to be mildly annoying. It is, mildly, annoying.
"Sven's review has been pushed back," Dalton says. "Indefinitely."
I look at him.
He doesn't take credit. He says it the way he says things that are done — flat, as information, nothing performed about it.
"Thank you," I say.
He looks slightly uncomfortable. The mask doesn't quite know what to do with direct gratitude.
I find this endearing. I do not say so.
He nods once and peels off toward the admin corridor.
Leo watches him go. Then he looks at me with the expression of someone who has been running calculations all evening and has arrived at a conclusion.
"Leo," I say.
"I'm not doing anything," he says.
"You're thinking about doing something."
