ELLIOT
“She fell asleep at the table again.”
James said it over the phone at eleven on a Thursday night in March with the fond, slightly concerned tone he had developed for situations involving Sera overworking, which had become its own distinct category of situation across the preceding three months.
Elliot was already in his car. He had known from her last message, sent at nine forty-seven, that the combination of constitutional law reading and the institute’s third active case brief and the legislative vote scheduled for Tuesday was going to produce exactly this outcome. The message had said: still reading. chapter fourteen is longer than some novels. He had replied: eat something. She had not responded.
“Is she all right,” he said.
“Spectacular, in the specific way of someone doin
