“Don’t make it a thing.”
“I won’t.”
She holds my gaze for one more second, then looks back down at her tea.
That is not permission.
It is not exactly warning either.
It is the narrowest possible space to do the right thing, if I can manage not to make an idiot of myself.
15
Chapter 14
Pippa
Imake it tothe office before I start shaking.
Which is something.
Not enough, but something.
The door is half-closed behind me. Not shut, because shutting it would make it look like I need privacy, and needing privacy is dangerously close to needing something. But not open either, because I cannot stand in the crew room for one more second with everyone looking to me for shape and edges and permission to keep functioning.
I have done the debrief.
I have checked the crew.
I have told them to eat, get warm, rest if they can.
I have said the things that needed saying.
The work was good.
The outcome was not what we wanted.
Do not sit there rewriting the whole incident as if a different thought at the wrong second changes what happened.
All true.
All necessary.
All completely useless against the sound of Arthur’s wife screaming his name into the rain.
I put my mug down on the desk, untouched, and brace both hands beside it.
The office is too bright.
The strip light hums. The computer monitor has gone to sleep. There is a stack of forms by the keyboard, a half-dead plant on the windowsill and a damp patch on the carpet near the door where someone’s boots have brought the night inside.
Normal things.
Normal, ugly, practical things.
I focus on them because they are safer than the other images my mind keeps trying to show me.
The orange flare of the roof.
