She leaves.
I look at the cupboard again.
The biscuit location has become mythological.
I do not investigate.
More personal growth.
11
Chapter 10
Pippa
By the fourth dayof AJ's assignment, the station has stopped treating him like an unexploded object.
Mostly.
Kev still calls him babyface, because Kev is a man of limited but persistent material. Dan has started asking him questions about newspapers as if they are slightly suspicious machines. Mish has discovered that if she leaves anything in an untidy pile near him for long enough, his eye starts twitching.
He has not reorganised the cupboards.
I know this because I checked.
He has, however, cleaned the kitchen twice, alphabetised a stack of community safety leaflets by accident and learned where the biscuits are without telling anyone else, which has earned him a grudging level of respect I am not entirely comfortable with.
It is the last day shift before his four days off.
After that, he comes back for nights, which I am trying not to think about too closely because night shifts do strange things to people. They strip away the careful edgesof the day. They make silences longer, conversations more honest and bad decisions feel less like bad decisions and more like perfectly reasonable events that happen under strip lighting at three in the morning.
Not that I am planning to make bad decisions.
Obviously.
At the moment, the bad decision is letting him interview me in my office.
“It won’t take long,” he said twenty minutes ago, standing in the doorway with his notebook and his hopeful journalist face.
That was his first lie.
His second was, “Just a few questions.”
There is no such thing as a few questions when a journalist has decided to be careful.
I sit behind my desk, arms folded, watching him arrange himself in the chair opposite. He has his notebook open on one knee, pen in hand, recorder placed between us after asking if I was all right with it.
He asked properly.
That annoyed me more than if he hadn’t.
“Comfortable?” I ask.
He shifts in the chair, then tries not to wince.
“Emotionally or physically?”
“Either.”
