It was an ordinary morning. Briefing at the seventh bell, an afternoon event at the third bell, and the usual gap between them that Caius had attempted to fill with a household meeting and then, finding it insufficient, had left as an unscheduled interval which he called \"preparation time\" and which was, in practice, the closest thing to unstructured rest that the schedule produced.\n\nDuring the seventh-bell briefing, Lira sat across from Eran and to his left, in the chair that had become, over the past several weeks, the chair she occupied during briefings. It was not assigned. No one had said: this is your chair. She had sat in it the second time and the third time and eventually it had become the chair, the way things became things through repetition until the repetition was invisible.\n\nShe was reviewing the afternoon event's participant list when she noticed the strand.\n\nIt was a single strand of hair, escaped from the rest of his meticulously maintained arrangement, lying across his forehead at a slight diagonal. She had seen it before, in the context of the catalog she had been keeping without meaning to keep: once after the Council meeting when he was standing at the window, once after the difficult conversation with the senior aide who had argued about the announcement timing. She had noted it and filed it and noted the conditions under which it appeared and filed those too, because she noticed things and filed them, it was simply what she did.\n\nShe looked at it now and then looked back at the participant list.\n\nShe read the same line three times without retaining it.\n\nShe looked up again. The strand was still there. It was not a significant thing. It was a strand of hair. She had observed it and categorized it and there was no further action required of her, and yet she found her attention returning to it with the specific unreasonableness of attention that had decided, without consulting her, that this was the thing it wanted to settle on this morning.\n\nShe had noticed, over the past five weeks, that she had been doing this: accumulating small observations about him that served no direct function she could identify. The strand. The way he held a cup when he was thinking, two-handed, as if the warmth of it was the point. The specific quality of his attention when someone said something he found genuinely interesting versus something he was managing. The pause before he answered questions he was not prepared for, which was shorter than the pause before questions he had prepared for, because the prepared answers took longer to retrieve than the honest ones.\n\nNone of these things were necessary for the performance. She had convinced the court in the first week that the arrangement was credible, and the court had remained convinced since. She did not need to know how he held a cup. She did not need a catalog of strand-appearances. She had made the catalog anyway.\n\nCaius came in with the afternoon event's schedule amendment, talking as he entered, with the effortless energy of someone who had decided long ago that rooms expanded to accommodate him rather than the other way around. He set the papers down and gestured at a section and said something about the seating arrangement that Lira answered with the correct information while some portion of her attention remained, against her explicit instruction to it, in the vicinity of the strand.\n\nEran looked up from his documents. He met her gaze.\n\nShe moved her eyes to the amended schedule.\n\nHer face was fine. She was excellent at her face being fine. The problem was not her face.\n\nShe continued answering Caius's questions about the seating arrangement, and she heard Eran make a small motion, and when she glanced back he had straightened slightly and his hand was moving toward his hair. A brief, almost automatic gesture, the kind of thing you did when you felt watched and could not identify why. He pushed the strand back into place. Then he resumed reading his documents.\n\nHe had not looked at her.\n\nShe had been looking at him and he had felt it and had not looked at her and had adjusted the thing she had been looking at, and none of this had been discussed, and the morning continued with its ordinary briefing energy.\n\nCaius left. They went over the last items on the schedule. Eran asked a clarifying question about the order of introductions and she answered it correctly. They stood up. She picked up her bag.\n\n\"Shall we go?\" he said. The same question he used every time the briefing ended. Crown Prince register, perfectly appropriate.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\nThey walked to the afternoon event in the correct formation at the correct distance. She kept her attention on the appropriate things: the path, the people they passed, the mental rehearsal of the introduction order. She was professional. She was present. She was not thinking about strands of hair in a private briefing room or what it meant that she had been watching for them.\n\nExcept that she was, and she knew she was, and she knew she knew she was, which was the particular iteration of knowing that she could not file away or categorize into something more manageable.\n\nThat evening she made a decision. She decided she would stop noticing small things. She would notice the large things, the professionally relevant things, the things that served the performance, and she would let the small things pass unregistered the way she had in the first week when she had not yet learned to read his stillness.\n\nShe made this decision firmly. She repeated it to herself twice.\n\nThen she went to sleep and dreamed, just briefly, about a briefing room and morning light and a single strand of dark hair catching the sun before a hand pushed it out of sight, and woke up knowing that the decision was going to be substantially harder to keep than it had been to make.\n\n\nShe went through the afternoon event and came back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the decision she had made that morning: to stop cataloguing small things. To stop keeping the inventory of details that served no direct function. To be professional and functional and to limit her attention to the things the arrangement required.\n\nShe thought about the decision with the detached attention of someone evaluating a plan they already knew had failed.\n\nIt had failed within forty-five minutes of being made. She had made it at seven-thirty in the morning. By nine-fifteen she had noticed the way he organized the documents on the table, largest to smallest, which she had observed before and noted and which she was supposed to have stopped noting. She had noticed the quality of his concentration during the section of the briefing that involved financial projections, which was different from his concentration during personnel discussions, closer and more exact, and she had not noted it explicitly but she had registered it in the part of her mind that registered things regardless of her explicit instructions.\n\nShe was not good at not paying attention to things she found interesting. She had known this about herself for a long time. It was generally a useful quality. Currently it was a quality that was producing information she had not requested and did not know what to do with.\n\nShe thought about the strand, which had been there this morning and which he had adjusted without looking at her, the automatic touch of someone who had felt watched without seeing who was watching. She thought about what it meant that he had felt it. People felt when they were being observed when the observation was specific enough and sustained enough to register below conscious attention, which meant she had been watching him specifically and for long enough to register.\n\nShe thought: I have been watching him.\n\nShe thought: I know this.\n\nShe thought: the question is not whether I have been watching, but what I am watching for.\n\nShe looked at her hands in her lap. The seamstress's hands, with their calluses and their small scars from pins and needles, the hands that had been building toward a different life from the one that had been available to her, carefully and without any guarantee.\n\nShe thought: I am watching because he is interesting.\n\nShe thought: he is interesting in the particular way that things are interesting when they are complicated and worth understanding.\n\nShe thought: that is not the same thing as caring about him.\n\nShe thought: say that again.\n\nShe said it again. It sounded less convincing the second time.\n\nShe went to bed early and slept badly and woke up resolved to do better tomorrow, by which she meant resolved to try the experiment of not noticing things again, and she had approximately the same rate of success as the first attempt.\n\nShe went through the next week noticing things and deciding not to notice things and noticing things anyway, and she tracked this as evidence of a problem she needed to solve but could not currently solve, and she handled the tracking with the pragmatic attitude she applied to problems she could not currently solve: she noted them, she set them aside, she returned to the task at hand.\n\nThe task at hand was performing an arrangement. She performed the arrangement. She attended the events and stood in the correct places and maintained the appropriate degree of visible mutual regard, and she found, in the performing of this, that the appropriate degree of visible mutual regard was no longer something she had to perform. It was something she was managing.\n\nThis was a distinction she was not sure was good.\n\nShe thought about it on a Tuesday, which was a free afternoon, sitting in the craft annex she had been given access to on the grounds that maintaining her outside work prevented the kind of professional deterioration that came from being fully absorbed in a temporary context. She had been using the access. She had been using it partly because she genuinely needed to maintain her work and partly because the craft annex was a space that was hers in the way the rest of the palace was not, where she was the most competent person in the room and the context was one she had built rather than borrowed.\n\nShe worked on the decorative piece she had been developing for three weeks, a wall hanging commission she had taken before the arrangement began and continued in the gaps. The pattern was complex and required full attention, which was its own kind of relief: something that took all of her and left nothing over for tangential thinking.\n\nShe worked for two hours. She finished the third section of the pattern and assessed the progress and found it good.\n\nShe thought: I am good at my work.\n\nShe thought: I have always been good at my work.\n\nShe thought: it is useful to remember the things I have always been, because the things I have always been are still true even inside contexts that are complicated.\n\nShe was a good seamstress. She was a woman who had built a life from what she had available. She was a person who was careful and specific and who did not make decisions she could not defend on second examination.\n\nShe was also, apparently, a person who stood at open doors and went through them.\n\nShe thought: both of these things are true.\n\nShe thought: I can hold both of these things.\n\nShe packed up her work and went back to her room and thought: tomorrow she would see him at the morning briefing and it would be ordinary, and the ordinary was manageable, and she was very good at managing the ordinary even when the ordinary was sitting on top of something complicated.\n\nShe thought: I am going to be fine.\n\nShe meant it more than she had the previous time she said it, which was progress.\n\nShe had a day in the middle of the week when everything was ordinary and nothing extraordinary happened and she found herself, at the end of it, sitting at her desk in the early evening and feeling something she could only describe as the particular quality of rightness that existed when you were exactly where you were supposed to be.\n\nShe had not felt this in a long time. She had felt competence and satisfaction and relief and occasional happiness, all of which were real and all of which she had valued. But this was something else, something that lived underneath the specific feelings, a quality of context, of fit.\n\nShe thought: this is what it feels like when a place becomes your place.\n\nShe thought: this is not my place.\n\nShe thought: I know that.\n\nShe thought: knowing that does not change the feeling.\n\nShe sat with both of those things and did not try to resolve them, because she had been learning, over the past several weeks, that some things did not resolve into a single conclusion and that holding two true things simultaneously was a skill worth developing.\n\nShe was good at developing skills. She had always been good at it. It was one of the things she was most reliable about herself: give her a skill to develop and she would develop it, through practice and attention and the willingness to be bad at something before she was good at it.\n\nShe thought: I am becoming good at this.\n\nShe thought: this meaning: the complicated thing that is happening, the holding of it, the inhabiting of the days.\n\nShe picked up her embroidery work and worked on it for an hour in the quiet of the evening, the needle moving through the fabric in the familiar rhythm, and she thought about nothing in particular, and that was its own kind of good.\n\nShe went to bed and the next morning she went to the briefing and she saw the strand and she filed it in the catalog and she made the decision again not to catalog things and she failed again and she thought: this is the shape of where I am, and the shape is fine, and I am inside it and I am fine.\n\nShe thought: fine.\n\nShe thought: yes.\n\nShe thought about the strand for three days.\n\nNot obsessively. Not in a way that interfered with the work or the events or the daily requirements. In the background, turning over the specific quality of the moment, the needle of her attention returning to it the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth: not because you intend to, but because it is there.\n\nThe strand was: a small thing. One strand of hair, the single detail that escaped his composure. She had seen it before, had noted it as a tell, had filed it in the catalog. She had not expected to still be thinking about it three days later.\n\nShe thought about why she was still thinking about it, and arrived, after a certain amount of roundabout examination, at the answer: she was not thinking about the strand. She was thinking about what she had done when she saw it. She had been looking, in that concentrated way that she did not do with everyone, in the way she did when something held her attention fully rather than partially. She had been looking at him and aware that she was looking, and then he had reached up and adjusted the strand without being told, moving in response to being watched, and the whole small sequence had been about nothing and also about everything that was currently happening.\n\nShe thought: I have been watching him for weeks.\n\nShe thought: I know this.\n\nShe thought: the knowing does not change that it keeps happening.\n\nShe thought about what it meant to watch someone the way she was watching him, which was: with curiosity, with attention, with the specific quality of interest that did not simplify things but wanted to understand them more completely. She had watched people before with strategic interest, trying to understand their motivations or their positions. This was not that. This was the other kind.\n\nShe thought: the other kind.\n\nShe thought: yes.\n\nShe put her embroidery down and looked at the ceiling of her room for a while, which told her nothing but gave her a neutral place to point her eyes.\n\nShe thought: I have forty-seven days.\n\nShe thought: forty-seven days of watching with the other kind of interest, and then the clean exit.\n\nShe thought: I can do forty-seven days.\n\nShe got back to her embroidery and did forty-seven days minus that evening, which was its own specific number, and she managed it, because she was very good at managing specific numbers.\n\nShe woke in the morning with the decision remade, as she remade it every morning: today I will be professional and present and I will not catalog small things. She got up and washed and dressed. By the time she arrived at the morning briefing she had already noted the quality of the morning light through the east corridor windows and the way it fell differently than it had last week as the season shifted, and she had noted this and she had not noted that she was noting it, and the day continued from there, ordinary, real, entirely her own.\n\nShe went to sleep with the catalog undeleted, because deleting the catalog had never worked, and decided that living with it was the more honest approach, and that honest approaches, even inconvenient ones, were the ones she preferred.\n\nThe morning came clean and ordinary and she went to the briefing and was present and professional and she did not catalog anything except the two things she noticed before she had finished deciding not to notice them, and she counted this as an acceptable rate of improvement.
You've reached the end of this chapter
It was an ordinary morning. Briefing at the seventh bell, an afternoon event at the third bell, and the usual gap between them that Caius had attempted to fill with a household meeting and then, finding it insufficient, had left as an unscheduled interval which he called \"preparation time\" and which was, in practice, the closest thing to unstructured rest that the schedule produced.\n\nDuring the seventh-bell briefing, Lira sat across from Eran and to his left, in the chair that had become, over the past several weeks, the chair she occupied during briefings. It was not assigned. No one had said: this is your chair. She had sat in it the second time and the third time and eventually it had become the chair, the way things became things through repetition until the repetition was invisible.\n\nShe was reviewing the afternoon event's participant list when she noticed the strand.\n\nIt was a single strand of hair, escaped from the rest of his meticulously maintained arrangement, lying across his forehead at a slight diagonal. She had seen it before, in the context of the catalog she had been keeping without meaning to keep: once after the Council meeting when he was standing at the window, once after the difficult conversation with the senior aide who had argued about the announcement timing. She had noted it and filed it and noted the conditions under which it appeared and filed those too, because she noticed things and filed them, it was simply what she did.\n\nShe looked at it now and then looked back at the participant list.\n\nShe read the same line three times without retaining it.\n\nShe looked up again. The strand was still there. It was not a significant thing. It was a strand of hair. She had observed it and categorized it and there was no further action required of her, and yet she found her attention returning to it with the specific unreasonableness of attention that had decided, without consulting her, that this was the thing it wanted to settle on this morning.\n\nShe had noticed, over the past five weeks, that she had been doing this: accumulating small observations about him that served no direct function she could identify. The strand. The way he held a cup when he was thinking, two-handed, as if the warmth of it was the point. The specific quality of his attention when someone said something he found genuinely interesting versus something he was managing. The pause before he answered questions he was not prepared for, which was shorter than the pause before questions he had prepared for, because the prepared answers took longer to retrieve than the honest ones.\n\nNone of these things were necessary for the performance. She had convinced the court in the first week that the arrangement was credible, and the court had remained convinced since. She did not need to know how he held a cup. She did not need a catalog of strand-appearances. She had made the catalog anyway.\n\nCaius came in with the afternoon event's schedule amendment, talking as he entered, with the effortless energy of someone who had decided long ago that rooms expanded to accommodate him rather than the other way around. He set the papers down and gestured at a section and said something about the seating arrangement that Lira answered with the correct information while some portion of her attention remained, against her explicit instruction to it, in the vicinity of the strand.\n\nEran looked up from his documents. He met her gaze.\n\nShe moved her eyes to the amended schedule.\n\nHer face was fine. She was excellent at her face being fine. The problem was not her face.\n\nShe continued answering Caius's questions about the seating arrangement, and she heard Eran make a small motion, and when she glanced back he had straightened slightly and his hand was moving toward his hair. A brief, almost automatic gesture, the kind of thing you did when you felt watched and could not identify why. He pushed the strand back into place. Then he resumed reading his documents.\n\nHe had not looked at her.\n\nShe had been looking at him and he had felt it and had not looked at her and had adjusted the thing she had been looking at, and none of this had been discussed, and the morning continued with its ordinary briefing energy.\n\nCaius left. They went over the last items on the schedule. Eran asked a clarifying question about the order of introductions and she answered it correctly. They stood up. She picked up her bag.\n\n\"Shall we go?\" he said. The same question he used every time the briefing ended. Crown Prince register, perfectly appropriate.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\nThey walked to the afternoon event in the correct formation at the correct distance. She kept her attention on the appropriate things: the path, the people they passed, the mental rehearsal of the introduction order. She was professional. She was present. She was not thinking about strands of hair in a private briefing room or what it meant that she had been watching for them.\n\nExcept that she was, and she knew she was, and she knew she knew she was, which was the particular iteration of knowing that she could not file away or categorize into something more manageable.\n\nThat evening she made a decision. She decided she would stop noticing small things. She would notice the large things, the professionally relevant things, the things that served the performance, and she would let the small things pass unregistered the way she had in the first week when she had not yet learned to read his stillness.\n\nShe made this decision firmly. She repeated it to herself twice.\n\nThen she went to sleep and dreamed, just briefly, about a briefing room and morning light and a single strand of dark hair catching the sun before a hand pushed it out of sight, and woke up knowing that the decision was going to be substantially harder to keep than it had been to make.\n\n\nShe went through the afternoon event and came back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the decision she had made that morning: to stop cataloguing small things. To stop keeping the inventory of details that served no direct function. To be professional and functional and to limit her attention to the things the arrangement required.\n\nShe thought about the decision with the detached attention of someone evaluating a plan they already knew had failed.\n\nIt had failed within forty-five minutes of being made. She had made it at seven-thirty in the morning. By nine-fifteen she had noticed the way he organized the documents on the table, largest to smallest, which she had observed before and noted and which she was supposed to have stopped noting. She had noticed the quality of his concentration during the section of the briefing that involved financial projections, which was different from his concentration during personnel discussions, closer and more exact, and she had not noted it explicitly but she had registered it in the part of her mind that registered things regardless of her explicit instructions.\n\nShe was not good at not paying attention to things she found interesting. She had known this about herself for a long time. It was generally a useful quality. Currently it was a quality that was producing information she had not requested and did not know what to do with.\n\nShe thought about the strand, which had been there this morning and which he had adjusted without looking at her, the automatic touch of someone who had felt watched without seeing who was watching. She thought about what it meant that he had felt it. People felt when they were being observed when the observation was specific enough and sustained enough to register below conscious attention, which meant she had been watching him specifically and for long enough to register.\n\nShe thought: I have been watching him.\n\nShe thought: I know this.\n\nShe thought: the question is not whether I have been watching, but what I am watching for.\n\nShe looked at her hands in her lap. The seamstress's hands, with their calluses and their small scars from pins and needles, the hands that had been building toward a different life from the one that had been available to her, carefully and without any guarantee.\n\nShe thought: I am watching because he is interesting.\n\nShe thought: he is interesting in the particular way that things are interesting when they are complicated and worth understanding.\n\nShe thought: that is not the same thing as caring about him.\n\nShe thought: say that again.\n\nShe said it again. It sounded less convincing the second time.\n\nShe went to bed early and slept badly and woke up resolved to do better tomorrow, by which she meant resolved to try the experiment of not noticing things again, and she had approximately the same rate of success as the first attempt.\n\nShe went through the next week noticing things and deciding not to notice things and noticing things anyway, and she tracked this as evidence of a problem she needed to solve but could not currently solve, and she handled the tracking with the pragmatic attitude she applied to problems she could not currently solve: she noted them, she set them aside, she returned to the task at hand.\n\nThe task at hand was performing an arrangement. She performed the arrangement. She attended the events and stood in the correct places and maintained the appropriate degree of visible mutual regard, and she found, in the performing of this, that the appropriate degree of visible mutual regard was no longer something she had to perform. It was something she was managing.\n\nThis was a distinction she was not sure was good.\n\nShe thought about it on a Tuesday, which was a free afternoon, sitting in the craft annex she had been given access to on the grounds that maintaining her outside work prevented the kind of professional deterioration that came from being fully absorbed in a temporary context. She had been using the access. She had been using it partly because she genuinely needed to maintain her work and partly because the craft annex was a space that was hers in the way the rest of the palace was not, where she was the most competent person in the room and the context was one she had built rather than borrowed.\n\nShe worked on the decorative piece she had been developing for three weeks, a wall hanging commission she had taken before the arrangement began and continued in the gaps. The pattern was complex and required full attention, which was its own kind of relief: something that took all of her and left nothing over for tangential thinking.\n\nShe worked for two hours. She finished the third section of the pattern and assessed the progress and found it good.\n\nShe thought: I am good at my work.\n\nShe thought: I have always been good at my work.\n\nShe thought: it is useful to remember the things I have always been, because the things I have always been are still true even inside contexts that are complicated.\n\nShe was a good seamstress. She was a woman who had built a life from what she had available. She was a person who was careful and specific and who did not make decisions she could not defend on second examination.\n\nShe was also, apparently, a person who stood at open doors and went through them.\n\nShe thought: both of these things are true.\n\nShe thought: I can hold both of these things.\n\nShe packed up her work and went back to her room and thought: tomorrow she would see him at the morning briefing and it would be ordinary, and the ordinary was manageable, and she was very good at managing the ordinary even when the ordinary was sitting on top of something complicated.\n\nShe thought: I am going to be fine.\n\nShe meant it more than she had the previous time she said it, which was progress.\n\nShe had a day in the middle of the week when everything was ordinary and nothing extraordinary happened and she found herself, at the end of it, sitting at her desk in the early evening and feeling something she could only describe as the particular quality of rightness that existed when you were exactly where you were supposed to be.\n\nShe had not felt this in a long time. She had felt competence and satisfaction and relief and occasional happiness, all of which were real and all of which she had valued. But this was something else, something that lived underneath the specific feelings, a quality of context, of fit.\n\nShe thought: this is what it feels like when a place becomes your place.\n\nShe thought: this is not my place.\n\nShe thought: I know that.\n\nShe thought: knowing that does not change the feeling.\n\nShe sat with both of those things and did not try to resolve them, because she had been learning, over the past several weeks, that some things did not resolve into a single conclusion and that holding two true things simultaneously was a skill worth developing.\n\nShe was good at developing skills. She had always been good at it. It was one of the things she was most reliable about herself: give her a skill to develop and she would develop it, through practice and attention and the willingness to be bad at something before she was good at it.\n\nShe thought: I am becoming good at this.\n\nShe thought: this meaning: the complicated thing that is happening, the holding of it, the inhabiting of the days.\n\nShe picked up her embroidery work and worked on it for an hour in the quiet of the evening, the needle moving through the fabric in the familiar rhythm, and she thought about nothing in particular, and that was its own kind of good.\n\nShe went to bed and the next morning she went to the briefing and she saw the strand and she filed it in the catalog and she made the decision again not to catalog things and she failed again and she thought: this is the shape of where I am, and the shape is fine, and I am inside it and I am fine.\n\nShe thought: fine.\n\nShe thought: yes.\n\nShe thought about the strand for three days.\n\nNot obsessively. Not in a way that interfered with the work or the events or the daily requirements. In the background, turning over the specific quality of the moment, the needle of her attention returning to it the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth: not because you intend to, but because it is there.\n\nThe strand was: a small thing. One strand of hair, the single detail that escaped his composure. She had seen it before, had noted it as a tell, had filed it in the catalog. She had not expected to still be thinking about it three days later.\n\nShe thought about why she was still thinking about it, and arrived, after a certain amount of roundabout examination, at the answer: she was not thinking about the strand. She was thinking about what she had done when she saw it. She had been looking, in that concentrated way that she did not do with everyone, in the way she did when something held her attention fully rather than partially. She had been looking at him and aware that she was looking, and then he had reached up and adjusted the strand without being told, moving in response to being watched, and the whole small sequence had been about nothing and also about everything that was currently happening.\n\nShe thought: I have been watching him for weeks.\n\nShe thought: I know this.\n\nShe thought: the knowing does not change that it keeps happening.\n\nShe thought about what it meant to watch someone the way she was watching him, which was: with curiosity, with attention, with the specific quality of interest that did not simplify things but wanted to understand them more completely. She had watched people before with strategic interest, trying to understand their motivations or their positions. This was not that. This was the other kind.\n\nShe thought: the other kind.\n\nShe thought: yes.\n\nShe put her embroidery down and looked at the ceiling of her room for a while, which told her nothing but gave her a neutral place to point her eyes.\n\nShe thought: I have forty-seven days.\n\nShe thought: forty-seven days of watching with the other kind of interest, and then the clean exit.\n\nShe thought: I can do forty-seven days.\n\nShe got back to her embroidery and did forty-seven days minus that evening, which was its own specific number, and she managed it, because she was very good at managing specific numbers.\n\nShe woke in the morning with the decision remade, as she remade it every morning: today I will be professional and present and I will not catalog small things. She got up and washed and dressed. By the time she arrived at the morning briefing she had already noted the quality of the morning light through the east corridor windows and the way it fell differently than it had last week as the season shifted, and she had noted this and she had not noted that she was noting it, and the day continued from there, ordinary, real, entirely her own.\n\nShe went to sleep with the catalog undeleted, because deleting the catalog had never worked, and decided that living with it was the more honest approach, and that honest approaches, even inconvenient ones, were the ones she preferred.\n\nThe morning came clean and ordinary and she went to the briefing and was present and professional and she did not catalog anything except the two things she noticed before she had finished deciding not to notice them, and she counted this as an acceptable rate of improvement.
You've reached the end of this chapter