ONE MORE MINUTES
Alex's pov first — then Glande's.
The door closed softly behind her.
I did not move.
I stood in the center of my office, and I listened to the specific sound of her footsteps receding down the corridor — the sound I had learned without deciding to, the rhythm that told me she was there and then told me when she was gone — and I waited until I could not hear them anymore.
Then I stood in the silence she had left behind.
*I wish it hadn't been.*
The words had come out of me before I had finished deciding to say them. That was the thing that was staying with me — not that I had said them. I had built my entire adult life on the discipline of not saying things until I had examined them from all available angles and determined both what I meant and what the saying of it
