Maro sent the link at seven forty-three in the morning, with a message that said only: have you seen this yet?
Naia had not. She was at the drafting table in the palace studio room she had been given for working, the coffee she had made going cold at her elbow, concept sketches for the second book spread in front of her in the loosely organized way of work in progress. She picked up her phone without particularly expecting anything and read the message and clicked the link.
The article was from a news aggregator that covered Haevon's royal family with the particular tone of publications that maintained they were reporting rather than speculating while doing a considerable amount of both. The headline was: Crown Prince's gaze: candid moment raises questions about palace relationship. Below the headline was a photograph.
Naia looked at the photograph for a long time.
It had been taken at the cocktail reception the previous evening, from an angle that suggested the photographer was positioned across the room rather than nearby, the kind of shot that required good equipment and patience rather than proximity. The image was clear. In it, Kael was standing slightly apart from the conversation cluster nearest him, and he was looking across the room.
At her.
She was visible in the background of the frame, in profile, talking to the gentleman with the precise haircut. She had not known she was being photographed. She had not known she was being observed from that direction. Her expression was the one she wore when she was genuinely paying attention to a conversation: open, interested, slightly animated, the face she made when the internal editor was not running and she was simply present.
His expression was different from anything she had seen in any of the official photographs from any of the official events. It was not the performed attentiveness of the royal public function, not the composed neutrality of his default register. It was the expression of someone who had forgotten, for a moment, that the expression was visible. The attention in it was specific and unguarded in a way that the article's writer clearly found significant and that Naia, looking at it across the screen of her phone in the palace studio room at seven forty-three in the morning, found she could not immediately categorize.
She put the phone face-down on the desk.
She picked it back up.
She read the article. The writer had framed it carefully, noting that the relationship was described by palace communications as genuine, suggesting that the photograph might support that framing, stopping just short of saying anything that could be characterized as fabricated, which was the particular skill of a certain kind of coverage. The comments below the article were, as comments tended to be, considerably less careful. Several used the word real. One used the phrase he looks at her like she's the only real thing in the room.
She closed the browser.
The Communications Office called her liaison at eight-fifteen to let her know there would be a brief all-hands meeting that morning to address the coverage. Standard practice. Nothing alarming. She confirmed she would attend.
The meeting was in one of the smaller conference rooms, the one that Naia associated with conversations that required a door rather than an open plan. Director Sae was there. Coordinator Lien. Two members of the PR team whose specific roles she had never fully clarified. And Kael, at the head of the table, in his official configuration.
Director Sae addressed the coverage. The framing from the palace's perspective was positive: the photograph had been widely shared, the reaction had been largely sympathetic to the narrative they were constructing, the image supported the authenticity message that had been the core of the arrangement's communications strategy from the beginning. However, they needed to contextualize it carefully to maintain control of the story.
Naia listened. She had become good at listening in these meetings, tracking the layers of what was being said and what was being not quite said and what everyone in the room understood without saying.
She also, quietly, watched Kael.
He was listening too, with the same quality of attention he gave to most things, present and tracking. But she had been in enough rooms with him now to notice the thing she was noticing, which was the particular quality of his stillness in this meeting compared to other meetings. It was the stillness of someone who had looked at the photograph and was sitting with what the photograph contained and had not yet decided what to do with the information.
After the meeting, the room cleared in the efficient way of people with schedules. Naia was collecting her notes when she realized that the last two people left in the room were herself and Kael.
The laptop Pol had used for the presentation was still open. On the screen, the photograph was still displayed from the section where Sae had shown it as a visual reference.
They both looked at it.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was not uncomfortable. It was the specific quiet of two people who are in the same space with something real and have not yet agreed on the language for it.
Naia spoke first, because she was discovering that she was more likely to be the one who spoke first when the silence contained something she was tired of sitting with alone.
She said: "I didn't know you were looking."
Not an accusation. A fact, stated plainly. She had not known she was being looked at in that moment, which meant the look had not been performed for her benefit or modified by her awareness of it, which meant it was what it appeared to be in the photograph.
He looked at the photograph for one more moment before he answered.
"I know," he said.
Two words. But the two words confirmed the thing the photograph contained: he knew she had not been aware of it, and he had looked anyway, and the photograph had caught something that was not performed and not managed and not, in any meaningful sense, an artifact of the arrangement.
The room held both of them in its morning quiet.
He stood. He straightened his jacket with the small, reflexive gesture she had catalogued. He was at the door when he stopped and turned back.
"The article is wrong about the framing," he said. He was looking at the door handle rather than at her. "But not about everything."
He left.
Naia sat in the empty conference room with the laptop still open and the photograph still on the screen and that sentence in the air where he had left it.
She thought about what it meant. She thought about the several ways it could be interpreted and which interpretation was most accurate and whether accuracy was the right frame for interpreting something that had been said at the door of an empty conference room by someone who had then immediately left without elaborating.
She thought about the photograph. The expression in it. The unguarded quality of it.
She closed the laptop.
She walked back to the studio room and sat at the drafting table and opened her sketchbook, and her hand began to move before her mind had caught up with it. She was not drawing the photograph. She was drawing what the photograph was of: not the image as captured but the moment as it had existed, the specific quality of attention that had been paid across a room by someone who had not intended it to be visible.
She drew the direction of it. The angle. The particular way attention had a shape when it was not trying to have one.
She looked at what she had drawn.
She turned to a new page and wrote at the top: Things I am trying not to know.
She wrote three items below it, in the small careful handwriting she used for things she was committing to paper because she needed to acknowledge them somewhere even if she was not ready to act on them.
She read the three items.
She closed the sketchbook.
She went back to the concept sketches for the second book, which needed attention and which were a more manageable object of focus than the sketchbook, and she worked steadily through the morning with the photograph filed somewhere in the background of her attention, present the way certain things were present, not demanding immediate engagement but not going anywhere either.
In the afternoon, Maro sent a second message: the photograph had cleared two million shares.
She read the number. She thought about the expression in the image, the one that had accumulated two million shares because it looked like something real, and about the fact that it was something real, and about what it meant that the two things were indistinguishable from the outside.
She thought about what was distinguishable from the inside.
She put the phone down and went back to work.
At dinner, in the smaller dining room she used when she was not at an official function, she ate alone and thought about the sentence he had left at the door of the conference room. Not about everything. She thought about which part of the article was not wrong and why he had chosen to say that in the way he had said it, at the door, already leaving, in the way of someone who had decided to say something before they could decide not to.
She had been collecting these moments. The accumulation had a weight now that she was beginning to carry in a way she noticed.
She finished dinner. She went to the studio room. She looked at the three items she had written in the sketchbook.
She did not add to the list.
She did not need to. The list was already accurate, and accuracy was enough for tonight.
In the afternoon, she went for a walk in the north garden, which she had been doing with increasing frequency as a way of occupying the body when the mind needed quiet. The garden in this section was wilder than the south garden, more overgrown in a way that was evidently deliberate, the plants arranged to look as if they had arranged themselves.
She walked the full perimeter and sat for a while on the bench near the wall where she had been with Kael that evening, before she had known it was his particular bench, before she had understood that the garden was his mother's garden. She sat there and looked at the east wall with its trained climbing plant, old and deliberate, and thought about the viral photograph and the sentence at the door of the conference room.
Not about everything.
She had been thinking about those three words at intervals throughout the day. She had come to the conclusion that there were essentially two ways to interpret them: as a deflection, a polite acknowledgment that the article had gotten something right while managing the implication, or as a statement of something true that he had chosen to make available without pressing further into it.
She thought about him and about what she had been accumulating in the catalogue and about whether deflection was consistent with the evidence she had.
The evidence was not consistent with deflection.
She thought about what that meant.
She had been trying to think about what that meant all day, carefully, methodically, in the way she approached drawings she could not immediately understand. She had been trying to think about it with the same honesty she tried to bring to the sketchbook, where the only audience was herself and accuracy was therefore the highest available standard.
The honest assessment was: she had been paying a specific kind of attention to him for sixty days and the attention had been going in both directions and she had been recording the evidence of this in a sketchbook she was almost unable to look at directly without feeling exposed, and she had been cataloguing it and turning pages and writing headings and filling four pages under things that were not in any briefing.
And today a photograph had made visible something that she had understood to be happening without quite allowing herself to know what she understood.
She sat with this.
The garden was quiet around her. The city beyond the walls was doing what it did. The climbing plant on the east wall was doing what it did, which was to continue being trained by an attention it had been receiving for longer than she had been alive.
She thought about patience with slow things.
She thought about what it meant to plant for a future you were not certain of.
She was not a patient person in most ways. She was efficient, she was thorough, she was dedicated to the work. But patience with uncertainty was a different skill, the skill of waiting for something to arrive in its own time rather than pursuing it to a conclusion before it was ready.
She thought she might need to learn it.
She walked back to the palace through the garden, and the garden was the same garden it always was, and she was not quite the same person she had been walking into it an hour ago. This was not unusual, she understood. This was what being in the arrangement had been doing, steadily and without drama, for sixty days: changing the person slightly, each day, in ways that were small enough not to notice individually and accumulating into something she was only now beginning to measure.
She went to dinner. She ate with Elan, who had a great deal to say about a documentary she had watched, and Naia was grateful for the conversation and its requirements, which were simple and warm and did not require her to navigate anything more complicated than her opinion of the documentary, which she had not seen but about which she could form a view from Elan's description.
After dinner she went to the studio room and worked on the second book for two hours, and the work was good because she had stopped trying to force the composition and had let the pencil do what pencils knew how to do.
She went to sleep before midnight, which was unusual, and slept better than she had in several days.
She woke up knowing what she was going to draw that day.
She went to find Elan that afternoon, because Elan was the one person in the palace whose company did not require her to manage what she was thinking while she was in it. Elan asked questions directly and received answers directly and did not require the careful curation that most of the palace required.
Elan was in the garden with her sketchbook, working on what appeared to be a study of the seed heads at the end of a particular plant, the ones that had gone to seed and were catching the afternoon light in the specific way of dry things that were structurally interesting if not conventionally beautiful.
Naia sat on the other end of the bench and did not say anything.
Elan drew for a few minutes, then said without looking up: "You saw the photograph."
"Yes."
"Everyone saw the photograph. It was the main thing people were talking about this morning at breakfast." Elan added a careful line. "How are you."
This was Elan's version of asking how she was doing, stated as a flat sentence rather than a question because Elan had observed that questions invited the deflection that statements did not.
Naia thought about the photograph. About the quality of his gaze in it. About the sentence left at the door of the conference room.
"I'm figuring something out," she said.
"Is it the kind of figuring out that resolves or the kind that doesn't?"
Naia thought about this. "I don't know yet. It depends on what I do with it."
Elan nodded. She added another line to the seed head. "He went for a walk this morning," she said. "He goes for walks when he has something to work through. He usually does not have things to work through, or he has them but processes them differently. He went for a walk this morning."
Naia was quiet.
"I'm telling you that," Elan said, "not as information that requires a response but as a data point. For whatever you're figuring out."
Naia looked at the garden, at the seed heads Elan was drawing, at the late light doing what late light did. She thought about going for walks when you had something to work through. She thought about what he had been working through and whether her theory about its content was the same as the theory Elan was evidently operating with.
She thought: I am sitting in this garden with a twenty-one-year-old who is considerably more direct than I am about what is happening.
She said: "Thank you."
Elan said: "You're welcome." And returned to the seed heads with the focused attention of someone who had said what they came to say and was now doing the work.
They sat in the garden until the light changed, and Naia thought about photographs and walks and data points and what it meant to have something to work through simultaneously with someone else, even if neither of you had acknowledged the simultaneity.
She thought about acknowledging the simultaneity.
She was not ready. But she was closer than she had been this morning.
She sat with the photograph for the last time that night and then put it away.
She put it away not because she was done with it but because she had extracted from it what it contained and there was no further use in looking at it. She knew what it showed. She knew what the sentence at the door of the conference room meant. She had been sitting with both pieces of information long enough to understand them.
What she understood was that the situation was not one-sided.
This was the understanding she had been approaching for days and had been managing to stay just ahead of. The situation required two people to create and both people were creating it, and she had been processing her side of it as the whole of it, which was the distortion of someone who is paying attention to their own attention and forgetting that attention can be mutual.
She thought about mutual.
She thought about the two minutes on the balcony and who had suggested them and why and what it had meant for someone to cross a room at a diplomatic event to offer her two minutes of cold air and a city and the particular privacy of a balcony with no cameras.
She thought: someone crossed a room for me.
She thought: I have been treating that as data rather than as a thing someone did.
She sat with the difference between data and a thing someone did.
She was going to have to do something with the difference.
She closed the laptop and turned off the lamp and lay in the dark and thought about what she was going to do, which was a question she was going to have to answer and had been not-answering for long enough that the not-answering was itself an answer, and she did not like that answer.
She thought: I will find the courage.
She thought: I will find it soon.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Maro sent the link at seven forty-three in the morning, with a message that said only: have you seen this yet?
Naia had not. She was at the drafting table in the palace studio room she had been given for working, the coffee she had made going cold at her elbow, concept sketches for the second book spread in front of her in the loosely organized way of work in progress. She picked up her phone without particularly expecting anything and read the message and clicked the link.
The article was from a news aggregator that covered Haevon's royal family with the particular tone of publications that maintained they were reporting rather than speculating while doing a considerable amount of both. The headline was: Crown Prince's gaze: candid moment raises questions about palace relationship. Below the headline was a photograph.
Naia looked at the photograph for a long time.
It had been taken at the cocktail reception the previous evening, from an angle that suggested the photographer was positioned across the room rather than nearby, the kind of shot that required good equipment and patience rather than proximity. The image was clear. In it, Kael was standing slightly apart from the conversation cluster nearest him, and he was looking across the room.
At her.
She was visible in the background of the frame, in profile, talking to the gentleman with the precise haircut. She had not known she was being photographed. She had not known she was being observed from that direction. Her expression was the one she wore when she was genuinely paying attention to a conversation: open, interested, slightly animated, the face she made when the internal editor was not running and she was simply present.
His expression was different from anything she had seen in any of the official photographs from any of the official events. It was not the performed attentiveness of the royal public function, not the composed neutrality of his default register. It was the expression of someone who had forgotten, for a moment, that the expression was visible. The attention in it was specific and unguarded in a way that the article's writer clearly found significant and that Naia, looking at it across the screen of her phone in the palace studio room at seven forty-three in the morning, found she could not immediately categorize.
She put the phone face-down on the desk.
She picked it back up.
She read the article. The writer had framed it carefully, noting that the relationship was described by palace communications as genuine, suggesting that the photograph might support that framing, stopping just short of saying anything that could be characterized as fabricated, which was the particular skill of a certain kind of coverage. The comments below the article were, as comments tended to be, considerably less careful. Several used the word real. One used the phrase he looks at her like she's the only real thing in the room.
She closed the browser.
The Communications Office called her liaison at eight-fifteen to let her know there would be a brief all-hands meeting that morning to address the coverage. Standard practice. Nothing alarming. She confirmed she would attend.
The meeting was in one of the smaller conference rooms, the one that Naia associated with conversations that required a door rather than an open plan. Director Sae was there. Coordinator Lien. Two members of the PR team whose specific roles she had never fully clarified. And Kael, at the head of the table, in his official configuration.
Director Sae addressed the coverage. The framing from the palace's perspective was positive: the photograph had been widely shared, the reaction had been largely sympathetic to the narrative they were constructing, the image supported the authenticity message that had been the core of the arrangement's communications strategy from the beginning. However, they needed to contextualize it carefully to maintain control of the story.
Naia listened. She had become good at listening in these meetings, tracking the layers of what was being said and what was being not quite said and what everyone in the room understood without saying.
She also, quietly, watched Kael.
He was listening too, with the same quality of attention he gave to most things, present and tracking. But she had been in enough rooms with him now to notice the thing she was noticing, which was the particular quality of his stillness in this meeting compared to other meetings. It was the stillness of someone who had looked at the photograph and was sitting with what the photograph contained and had not yet decided what to do with the information.
After the meeting, the room cleared in the efficient way of people with schedules. Naia was collecting her notes when she realized that the last two people left in the room were herself and Kael.
The laptop Pol had used for the presentation was still open. On the screen, the photograph was still displayed from the section where Sae had shown it as a visual reference.
They both looked at it.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was not uncomfortable. It was the specific quiet of two people who are in the same space with something real and have not yet agreed on the language for it.
Naia spoke first, because she was discovering that she was more likely to be the one who spoke first when the silence contained something she was tired of sitting with alone.
She said: "I didn't know you were looking."
Not an accusation. A fact, stated plainly. She had not known she was being looked at in that moment, which meant the look had not been performed for her benefit or modified by her awareness of it, which meant it was what it appeared to be in the photograph.
He looked at the photograph for one more moment before he answered.
"I know," he said.
Two words. But the two words confirmed the thing the photograph contained: he knew she had not been aware of it, and he had looked anyway, and the photograph had caught something that was not performed and not managed and not, in any meaningful sense, an artifact of the arrangement.
The room held both of them in its morning quiet.
He stood. He straightened his jacket with the small, reflexive gesture she had catalogued. He was at the door when he stopped and turned back.
"The article is wrong about the framing," he said. He was looking at the door handle rather than at her. "But not about everything."
He left.
Naia sat in the empty conference room with the laptop still open and the photograph still on the screen and that sentence in the air where he had left it.
She thought about what it meant. She thought about the several ways it could be interpreted and which interpretation was most accurate and whether accuracy was the right frame for interpreting something that had been said at the door of an empty conference room by someone who had then immediately left without elaborating.
She thought about the photograph. The expression in it. The unguarded quality of it.
She closed the laptop.
She walked back to the studio room and sat at the drafting table and opened her sketchbook, and her hand began to move before her mind had caught up with it. She was not drawing the photograph. She was drawing what the photograph was of: not the image as captured but the moment as it had existed, the specific quality of attention that had been paid across a room by someone who had not intended it to be visible.
She drew the direction of it. The angle. The particular way attention had a shape when it was not trying to have one.
She looked at what she had drawn.
She turned to a new page and wrote at the top: Things I am trying not to know.
She wrote three items below it, in the small careful handwriting she used for things she was committing to paper because she needed to acknowledge them somewhere even if she was not ready to act on them.
She read the three items.
She closed the sketchbook.
She went back to the concept sketches for the second book, which needed attention and which were a more manageable object of focus than the sketchbook, and she worked steadily through the morning with the photograph filed somewhere in the background of her attention, present the way certain things were present, not demanding immediate engagement but not going anywhere either.
In the afternoon, Maro sent a second message: the photograph had cleared two million shares.
She read the number. She thought about the expression in the image, the one that had accumulated two million shares because it looked like something real, and about the fact that it was something real, and about what it meant that the two things were indistinguishable from the outside.
She thought about what was distinguishable from the inside.
She put the phone down and went back to work.
At dinner, in the smaller dining room she used when she was not at an official function, she ate alone and thought about the sentence he had left at the door of the conference room. Not about everything. She thought about which part of the article was not wrong and why he had chosen to say that in the way he had said it, at the door, already leaving, in the way of someone who had decided to say something before they could decide not to.
She had been collecting these moments. The accumulation had a weight now that she was beginning to carry in a way she noticed.
She finished dinner. She went to the studio room. She looked at the three items she had written in the sketchbook.
She did not add to the list.
She did not need to. The list was already accurate, and accuracy was enough for tonight.
In the afternoon, she went for a walk in the north garden, which she had been doing with increasing frequency as a way of occupying the body when the mind needed quiet. The garden in this section was wilder than the south garden, more overgrown in a way that was evidently deliberate, the plants arranged to look as if they had arranged themselves.
She walked the full perimeter and sat for a while on the bench near the wall where she had been with Kael that evening, before she had known it was his particular bench, before she had understood that the garden was his mother's garden. She sat there and looked at the east wall with its trained climbing plant, old and deliberate, and thought about the viral photograph and the sentence at the door of the conference room.
Not about everything.
She had been thinking about those three words at intervals throughout the day. She had come to the conclusion that there were essentially two ways to interpret them: as a deflection, a polite acknowledgment that the article had gotten something right while managing the implication, or as a statement of something true that he had chosen to make available without pressing further into it.
She thought about him and about what she had been accumulating in the catalogue and about whether deflection was consistent with the evidence she had.
The evidence was not consistent with deflection.
She thought about what that meant.
She had been trying to think about what that meant all day, carefully, methodically, in the way she approached drawings she could not immediately understand. She had been trying to think about it with the same honesty she tried to bring to the sketchbook, where the only audience was herself and accuracy was therefore the highest available standard.
The honest assessment was: she had been paying a specific kind of attention to him for sixty days and the attention had been going in both directions and she had been recording the evidence of this in a sketchbook she was almost unable to look at directly without feeling exposed, and she had been cataloguing it and turning pages and writing headings and filling four pages under things that were not in any briefing.
And today a photograph had made visible something that she had understood to be happening without quite allowing herself to know what she understood.
She sat with this.
The garden was quiet around her. The city beyond the walls was doing what it did. The climbing plant on the east wall was doing what it did, which was to continue being trained by an attention it had been receiving for longer than she had been alive.
She thought about patience with slow things.
She thought about what it meant to plant for a future you were not certain of.
She was not a patient person in most ways. She was efficient, she was thorough, she was dedicated to the work. But patience with uncertainty was a different skill, the skill of waiting for something to arrive in its own time rather than pursuing it to a conclusion before it was ready.
She thought she might need to learn it.
She walked back to the palace through the garden, and the garden was the same garden it always was, and she was not quite the same person she had been walking into it an hour ago. This was not unusual, she understood. This was what being in the arrangement had been doing, steadily and without drama, for sixty days: changing the person slightly, each day, in ways that were small enough not to notice individually and accumulating into something she was only now beginning to measure.
She went to dinner. She ate with Elan, who had a great deal to say about a documentary she had watched, and Naia was grateful for the conversation and its requirements, which were simple and warm and did not require her to navigate anything more complicated than her opinion of the documentary, which she had not seen but about which she could form a view from Elan's description.
After dinner she went to the studio room and worked on the second book for two hours, and the work was good because she had stopped trying to force the composition and had let the pencil do what pencils knew how to do.
She went to sleep before midnight, which was unusual, and slept better than she had in several days.
She woke up knowing what she was going to draw that day.
She went to find Elan that afternoon, because Elan was the one person in the palace whose company did not require her to manage what she was thinking while she was in it. Elan asked questions directly and received answers directly and did not require the careful curation that most of the palace required.
Elan was in the garden with her sketchbook, working on what appeared to be a study of the seed heads at the end of a particular plant, the ones that had gone to seed and were catching the afternoon light in the specific way of dry things that were structurally interesting if not conventionally beautiful.
Naia sat on the other end of the bench and did not say anything.
Elan drew for a few minutes, then said without looking up: "You saw the photograph."
"Yes."
"Everyone saw the photograph. It was the main thing people were talking about this morning at breakfast." Elan added a careful line. "How are you."
This was Elan's version of asking how she was doing, stated as a flat sentence rather than a question because Elan had observed that questions invited the deflection that statements did not.
Naia thought about the photograph. About the quality of his gaze in it. About the sentence left at the door of the conference room.
"I'm figuring something out," she said.
"Is it the kind of figuring out that resolves or the kind that doesn't?"
Naia thought about this. "I don't know yet. It depends on what I do with it."
Elan nodded. She added another line to the seed head. "He went for a walk this morning," she said. "He goes for walks when he has something to work through. He usually does not have things to work through, or he has them but processes them differently. He went for a walk this morning."
Naia was quiet.
"I'm telling you that," Elan said, "not as information that requires a response but as a data point. For whatever you're figuring out."
Naia looked at the garden, at the seed heads Elan was drawing, at the late light doing what late light did. She thought about going for walks when you had something to work through. She thought about what he had been working through and whether her theory about its content was the same as the theory Elan was evidently operating with.
She thought: I am sitting in this garden with a twenty-one-year-old who is considerably more direct than I am about what is happening.
She said: "Thank you."
Elan said: "You're welcome." And returned to the seed heads with the focused attention of someone who had said what they came to say and was now doing the work.
They sat in the garden until the light changed, and Naia thought about photographs and walks and data points and what it meant to have something to work through simultaneously with someone else, even if neither of you had acknowledged the simultaneity.
She thought about acknowledging the simultaneity.
She was not ready. But she was closer than she had been this morning.
She sat with the photograph for the last time that night and then put it away.
She put it away not because she was done with it but because she had extracted from it what it contained and there was no further use in looking at it. She knew what it showed. She knew what the sentence at the door of the conference room meant. She had been sitting with both pieces of information long enough to understand them.
What she understood was that the situation was not one-sided.
This was the understanding she had been approaching for days and had been managing to stay just ahead of. The situation required two people to create and both people were creating it, and she had been processing her side of it as the whole of it, which was the distortion of someone who is paying attention to their own attention and forgetting that attention can be mutual.
She thought about mutual.
She thought about the two minutes on the balcony and who had suggested them and why and what it had meant for someone to cross a room at a diplomatic event to offer her two minutes of cold air and a city and the particular privacy of a balcony with no cameras.
She thought: someone crossed a room for me.
She thought: I have been treating that as data rather than as a thing someone did.
She sat with the difference between data and a thing someone did.
She was going to have to do something with the difference.
She closed the laptop and turned off the lamp and lay in the dark and thought about what she was going to do, which was a question she was going to have to answer and had been not-answering for long enough that the not-answering was itself an answer, and she did not like that answer.
She thought: I will find the courage.
She thought: I will find it soon.
You've reached the end of this chapter