Cole went quiet for four days.
Not the absence from the rotation. Not the operational silence or the composure or the flat eyes. A different quiet — the quiet of a man whose body was processing something his architecture had no protocol for. He went to work. He came home. He made the Ethiopian — consistent, correct, the bloom at forty-five seconds. He stood at the island and drank his coffee and his eyes were somewhere I couldn't follow because the somewhere was twenty-one years deep and the woman who lived there was the one person his walls had been built to keep out.
I gave him space. Not the deadbolt space — the other kind. The kind where you're in the same room and you let the silence exist without filling it. I made coffee. I ran both shops. I checked in with Wen, who was running Union Station with the competence of a woman who'd been waiting for authority and wore it the way I wore the gray t-shirt — like it had always been hers.
