I shower. Dress. Walk to her room. Knock.
She opens the door. She's still wearing the interview clothes — a tailored navy blouse, dark trousers, the steel watch. Her hair is neat. Her face is composed. She looks exactly like a woman who has spent the past two hours presenting herself as a functional, articulate professional to a camera crew.
Except for her hands.
She's holding them against her thighs, fingers pressed flat against the fabric, the way you'd press a wound to stop the bleeding. The tremor is visible even through the compression — a fine, persistent vibration that travels from her wrists to her fingertips and makes the fabric of her trousers shift in barely perceptible ripples.
She sees me looking. She doesn't move her hands.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." I step inside. Close the door behind me. "And that's allowed."
She turns away. Walks to the window. The hotel room is unremarkable — standard layout, standard lighting, the anonymous geography of temporary spaces. She stares at the car park below as if it contains strategic information.
"The interviewer asked about the moment I knew it was over. I'd approved the question in advance. I'd prepared an answer. I'd rehearsed the language in my head for three days — specific, factual, controlled." She pauses. Her shoulders are rigid. "My voice broke on the wordputt."
"Nerys—"
"I couldn't say the wordputtwithout my voice breaking. On camera. Recorded. A forty-four-year-old woman who cannot say a single-syllable word without sounding like she's being dismantled."
"How long did you stay?"
"Twelve minutes. The interview was scheduled for forty-five."
She's still facing the window. Her hands are still pressed against her thighs. I can see the tremor from across the room — the subtle motion of her fingers, the tension in her forearms, the effort of a body trying to suppress an involuntary response through sheer force of intention.
I know what she wants me to do. She wants me to be professional. To acknowledge the difficulty, offer measured support, suggest a debrief with Phaedra, and return to the strategic framework that governs our interactions during business hours.
I know what she needs me to do.
"Do you want me to leave," I say, "or do you want me to stay and make this about something other than that studio?"
She turns. Her eyes are dry — she hasn't been crying; the distress is structural rather than emotional, living in her nervous system rather than her tear ducts. She looks at me the way she looked at the course maps in the cottage — with the particular intensity of a woman trying to determine whether the terrain in front of her is safe to cross.
"Stay."
I walk to her. Not fast. Not with the urgency that has been my default in every previous encounter. I walk to her the way she walks a course — measuring, reading, arriving at the right moment rather than the earliest one.
I take her hands.
She resists. A small pull backward, the instinct to hide the tremor, to press it against her body where I can't see it. I hold firm. Not aggressively — the way she held my wrists in Singapore. Present. Not releasing.
I lift her right hand. The scarred thumb. The long fingers vibrating against my palm.
I kiss her thumb. The scar. Slowly. Feeling the tremor against my lips.
Then the inside of her wrist, where the tendons are tight and the pulse is elevated.
Then each finger. Index. Middle. Ring. Pinkie. Each knuckle, each pad, each tip. Her hand shakes throughout. I kiss it anyway. I kiss it because of the shaking, not despite it.
"These hands won two majors," I say.
"These hands couldn't make a three-foot putt—"
"These hands made me come so hard in Singapore I forgot my own name." I look up at her. Six inches of height, her face above mine, those gray-green eyes. "These hands. Right here. The ones that are shaking right now. These are the hands that touched me so precisely I couldn't form a sentence afterward. These are the hands that held my face in a corridor and kissed me like I was worth being steady for."
I take both of her trembling hands and I place them on my body.
