She had slept on it. She had told herself this was the rational approach: let the immediate response settle, see what remained after the settling, make decisions from that place rather than from the hot surface of the event itself.\n\nWhat remained, after the settling, was a question she had no clean answer to.\n\nShe found him before the morning session. She had been to his office, which was not a place she went unprompted, and had been told he was in the hall outside the council suite, and went there instead. He saw her coming. She saw him see her. She had learned to read, in the previous seven weeks, the small differences in the way he prepared himself for different kinds of interactions, and she watched him prepare for this one and could not tell exactly what kind of interaction he was expecting. She could tell that he had expected it would come.\n\nShe kept her voice level. \"I want to talk about yesterday.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said.\n\nShe looked at the corridor. There was a clerk at the far end, doing something with a ledger. \"Somewhere that isn't a hallway.\"\n\nHe opened a door that turned out to be a small waiting room for the council anteroom, not a space she had been in, empty at this hour. She went in. He followed. He closed the door.\n\nShe stood in the middle of the room and turned to face him. She was not angry. She had reviewed the question of whether she was angry, and she had concluded that she was not, that anger was not the appropriate category for what she was feeling, and she needed to say what she needed to say without the texture of anger making it something other than what it was.\n\n\"Yesterday,\" she said. \"What was that?\"\n\nHe looked at her steadily. \"I addressed a situation.\"\n\n\"You addressed it,\" she said, \"like I was someone you were actually protecting.\"\n\nHe said nothing. He did not confirm it and he did not deny it, and she had learned enough about him to know that the not-denying was itself an answer.\n\n\"That's not what the contract says.\" She said it carefully, without heat. \"And I need it to stay what the contract says.\"\n\nHe was very still. \"You would have preferred I didn't intervene.\"\n\n\"I would have preferred,\" she said, and heard herself starting the sentence and then continuing it even though some part of her knew she was going somewhere she had not fully mapped, \"you did it because it was protocol. Because that is what the contract covers. Not because,\" and there she stopped.\n\nBecause why, said the sentence she could not finish.\n\nHe looked at her. His face was neutral and his voice was quiet and he did nothing dramatic, and yet she had the experience of being looked at very precisely, of being seen accurately, of being known in a way she had not agreed to.\n\n\"Not because what?\" he said.\n\nShe thought about her options. She thought about finishing the sentence. She thought about what it would cost her, the specific cost, the kind she had been careful about for twenty-two years.\n\n\"Just keep it professional,\" she said. \"That's what I'm asking. Whatever happened yesterday, I need the rest of the arrangement to stay inside the contract terms.\"\n\nThe silence after this was different from the other silences she had catalogued. It had a specific density to it, the density of something that was being held in place by effort on both sides.\n\nHe said: \"Noted.\"\n\nOne word. Crown Prince mode, fully engaged, the wall back in its place with the efficiency of someone who had very good practice with walls.\n\nShe felt it like a door closing. She had asked for it. She had been the one who said: stay inside the contract. And he had said: noted, and complied, and she was standing in the small waiting room understanding that she had received exactly what she requested and that it was not what she wanted and that these two things did not reconcile.\n\nThey went through the morning session. She performed correctly. He taught correctly. The wall was up on both sides and the session had the quality of the first week, formal and functional and nothing more. She had been good at this in the first week. She was finding it harder to be good at it now that she knew the alternative.\n\nAt the end of the session she said, without planning to: \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nHe had been gathering his papers. He stopped. He did not turn around.\n\n\"For what specifically,\" he said.\n\nAnd that was the problem, wasn't it. She did not have a specific answer. She was sorry for asking him to stay inside the contract when what she had actually wanted was for him to tell her why he had not. She was sorry for the distance she had requested because the alternative scared her more than the distance. She was sorry for both things being true at the same time.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"I just am.\"\n\nHe was quiet for a moment. Then he finished gathering his papers and left.\n\nShe stood in the practice room alone. She looked at the wall where he had been standing.\n\nShe thought about the word sorry and all the things it was trying to contain, which was too many things for one word.\n\nShe thought: I asked for the contract. I asked for the distance. I asked for exactly what I got.\n\nShe thought: I am very bad at wanting things that are the same as what I ask for.\n\nThis was not new information about herself. She had known this for a long time. The specific application of it, however, to this context, to these walls in this room and this man who had walked out of it, felt newly sharp and not particularly welcome.\n\nShe went to lunch and sat alone and read the requisition notes she had been reading for two weeks, and did not taste whatever she was eating, and told herself very firmly that the distance was the right choice.\n\nShe believed this. She believed it more or less continuously, with brief and inconvenient interruptions, for the rest of the day.\n\n\nShe thought about the word noted for the rest of the day.\n\nShe turned it over in different lights. She looked at it from the angle of its most neutral interpretation: a confirmation of receipt, an acknowledgment that information had been recorded, a professional response to a professional request. Noted was exactly the right word for the Crown Prince to use when Lady Sohn requested professional distance. It was appropriate and efficient and correct in every way.\n\nShe thought: I asked for it.\n\nShe thought: he gave me exactly what I asked for.\n\nShe thought: why do I feel like I have misplaced something.\n\nShe was in the dining hall eating lunch that she was not tasting when she identified the problem, which was that she had asked for the wall because the alternative was acknowledging what existed on the other side of it, and she had spent the morning behind the wall, and the wall was exactly as effective as she had needed it to be, and it felt like being in a room that had been perfectly sealed: technically correct, substantially airless.\n\nShe ate the lunch and went back to her room and sat at the desk and looked at the notes she had made during the morning session. The notes were accurate and comprehensive and gave a complete record of everything that had been covered. They gave no record of the quality of the silence in the practice room, which had the particular texture of two people being very careful near each other, or of the way he had gathered his papers at the end with slightly more deliberateness than usual, or of the word sorry and what she had meant by it and what she had not been able to say.\n\nShe had said sorry without knowing what she was sorry for. This was unusual for her. She was someone who maintained precise accounts of her own behavior, who knew what she owed and what she was owed and who kept the two separate. An apology without a specific referent was the kind of imprecision she did not usually permit herself.\n\nShe thought: I was sorry for asking for the wall. I was sorry for needing the wall. I was sorry for being the kind of person who needed the wall.\n\nShe thought: none of those are things I can say.\n\nShe thought: he asked me for what specifically, and he was right to ask, and I did not have an answer.\n\nShe looked at her notes. She looked out the window. She thought about the practice room in the morning, the formal posture and the correct distance and the way that correct distance had the quality of a fact she had chosen and then found herself on the wrong side of.\n\nShe thought: this is what the clause was for.\n\nShe thought: both parties.\n\nShe thought: I understand now, more specifically than I did when I read it, what the clause was anticipating.\n\nShe went to dinner and came back and went to bed early and lay in the dark without sleeping and thought about the clean exit that was still, she counted, eighty-seven days away, and about the fact that eighty-seven days had felt very long on day one and was beginning to feel like a different kind of quantity entirely.\n\nShe spent four days inside the professional distance she had requested, and she used those four days the way you used difficult periods: to take stock, to reassess, to understand what she was actually working with.\n\nWhat she was working with:\n\nThe arrangement had developed complications she had not anticipated. She had not anticipated them because she had, she now understood, misunderstood her own capabilities in this specific regard. She had believed she was someone who did not form attachments, because she had successfully not formed them many times in many places. She had not understood that not forming attachments in those situations was possible partly because those situations had not offered her anything that made the forming feel worth the risk.\n\nThis situation had offered her something that made the forming feel worth the risk. She had formed something. She was living inside something she had formed without meaning to form, and the thing she had formed was real, and the clean exit was in eighty-seven days, and she had asked for professional distance because the alternative was to name what she had formed, and she was not ready to name it, and perhaps she would never be ready, and the clean exit was eighty-seven days away.\n\nShe thought: this is manageable.\n\nShe thought: it is not pleasant, but it is manageable, and the difference between pleasant and manageable is a difference I have navigated before.\n\nShe thought about her father, who had navigated his grief at the loss of her mother and had kept moving and had built something in the space of it, and she thought about the way he had talked about difficult periods, which was as information rather than as failure. A difficult period tells you where you are, he had said. It does not tell you where you are going.\n\nShe thought: I know where I am going.\n\nShe thought: I am going to the end of the hundred days and then to the house with the door that is mine.\n\nShe thought: that is still true.\n\nShe thought: the other thing that is true does not make that less true.\n\nShe thought: I am going to hold both of these simultaneously and I am going to be careful with both of them and I am going to honor the agreement I signed.\n\nShe thought: I can do this.\n\nShe thought: I have done harder things.\n\nShe closed her notebook and went to dinner and sat across from Caius and ate her food and talked about the next week's schedule, and she was present and professional and managed, and she thought: this is what eighty-seven days looks like, and I can do eighty-seven days.\n\nShe went to bed and counted, quietly, and then stopped counting, and breathed, and eventually the breathing was enough.\n\nShe woke up on the fourth day with the professional distance still in place and a clearer head than she had expected.\n\nShe had been expecting, based on her experience with difficult emotional periods, a sort of murky heaviness to the aftermath, the quality of light through clouds rather than directly. She had the clear head instead, which she attributed to having said the right thing rather than the comfortable thing, which was not always the same.\n\nThe right thing had been: I am sorry. Not I am sorry for asking for the distance. Not I am sorry for the contract and what it says and for needing both the wall and the thing on the other side of the wall. Just: I am sorry. And then the silence after, which was not resolved but was present, which was enough.\n\nShe thought about what the morning session had been. Correct. Complete. Professional. The kind of session that demonstrated both parties' commitment to the terms. She had conducted herself exactly according to the terms and she would continue to conduct herself according to the terms because the terms were what she had signed and they were what she had agreed to and she was someone who honored what she agreed to.\n\nShe thought: I am honoring the terms.\n\nShe thought: I am also sorry.\n\nShe thought: both of those things can be true.\n\nShe went through the day with this balance maintained, and it was a real balance, not a performed one, which was different and which cost something but cost less than pretending.\n\nShe thought about the word noted and about the wall that had gone up with it and about the fact that she had requested the wall and received the wall and was now on her side of it, correctly, where she had asked to be.\n\nShe thought: I asked for this.\n\nShe thought: yes.\n\nShe thought: I would ask for it again.\n\nShe thought: yes. Because the alternative is something I cannot afford and the arrangement is real and the other person in it deserves to have it honored.\n\nShe thought: the honoring costs something.\n\nShe thought: I know.\n\nShe thought: I am willing to pay it.\n\nShe ate dinner and went to bed and lay in the dark and counted eighty-seven days and the counting felt like a discipline and discipline was something she was good at and being good at something was useful and usefulness was enough.\n\nShe breathed. She slept. She rose and did it again.\n\nShe thought about the apology she had made, the insufficient one, the I am sorry without a what for.\n\nShe had not apologized without a what for since she was very young, since the years when she was still learning that sorry was a word with weight and that deploying it without the weight behind it was its own kind of untruth. She had been very careful about sorry for a long time. She had been careful because sorry opened things, and opened things were harder to manage than closed ones.\n\nShe had opened something and then stood on the other side of it without the words to explain why she had opened it.\n\nShe thought: I owe him a better apology.\n\nShe thought: a better apology requires naming the thing.\n\nShe thought: I am not ready to name the thing.\n\nShe thought about the gap between not being ready and never being ready, and about whether there was a version of readiness she could work toward incrementally, the way she worked toward everything incrementally.\n\nShe thought: incremental readiness for naming things.\n\nShe thought: that is a possible project.\n\nShe thought about eighty-seven days, in which the project could or could not proceed, depending on circumstances she could not fully control.\n\nShe thought: I am not good at not controlling things.\n\nShe thought: I am learning.\n\nShe went about the afternoon and the evening with the project in mind, not actively working on it but holding it as something she intended to return to. She was good at holding things she intended to return to. She had a large inventory of such things, built over twenty-two years of moving, and most of them she had eventually returned to.\n\nShe thought: most.\n\nShe thought: most is a reasonable success rate.\n\nShe went to bed with eighty-seven days and the insufficient apology and the project of incremental readiness, and she held all three as things she was managing, and she slept.\n\nIn the morning, there were eighty-six days, and they began.\n\nShe rose the next morning and remade the decision as she remade it every morning: honor what you signed, be here fully, carry both things with care.\n\nShe went to the morning session. He was already there. They worked through the agenda with the efficient collaboration they had built over weeks of practice, and at the end of it she thought: this is still real. Even inside the wall. Even inside the professional distance. This is still real.\n\nShe thought: both sides of the wall are real.\n\nShe thought: I can live with that.\n\nShe believed it. Mostly. Enough to get through the day, which was all she needed, which was sufficient.\n\nMorning followed morning. The distance held. She held it with it.\n\nShe counted eighty-six days and went to sleep. The day had been real. That was enough. Real days were enough, accumulated honestly, one after the other, all the way to the end.