She leaned back in her chair, the movement slow and heavy, as if the weight of the conversation were physically pressing against her spine. She stared at the amber lines on the diagram, her eyes tracing the deceptive beauty of the depot's structure.
"Stanley looked at this diagram yesterday," she said, her voice drifting into a hollow, reflective space. "He looked at it for all of ten seconds, said it was 'interesting,' and then asked if I wanted tea."
The silence that followed was sharp. It wasn't an insult to Stanley but a quiet indictment of the distance between his perception and her obsession.
"Stanley has a different kind of intelligence," Mike said.
He didn't offer it as a consolation; he offered it as a structural fact.
"I know," Ellie replied.
There was no heat in her voice, no defensive fire to protect her partner. There was only a weary, settled acceptance. "I know that's true. He's brilliant, in his own way."
