He came to my room at eleven that night.
I had been expecting it. Or rather I had been expecting something, the confrontation or the controlled assessment of damage or some form of response that matched the scale of what Dr. Vance had told him. I had spent the hours between the sitting room and midnight sitting on the edge of my bed and building, with the diminishing materials available to me, some version of how I would answer when it arrived.
None of the versions I constructed felt like enough.
The knock was quiet. Two beats, unhurried. Not the knock of a man arriving in anger. I opened the door.
He was still in his work clothes, jacket gone, collar open, sleeves turned back two folds in the way he permitted himself late at night. He looked at me through the open door without speaking, and in the quality of that silence I registered something I had not seen on his face across all the months I had been inside his orbit.
He looked uncertain.
