Satsuki made her list on Sunday night, alone at the desk in her room, with a blank page in front of her and a pen she had not yet uncapped.
She sat with the blankness for a while.
This was not, she had long ago decided, a character flaw. The ability to sit with a blank page and not rush to fill it was a skill — the skill of knowing that what you wrote first was usually not what you actually meant, that the first names to arrive were the habitual ones, the obligatory ones, the names you wrote because you had always written them on things like this and had not yet asked yourself whether that habit was still accurate.
She uncapped the pen.
