Thursday started well.
That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward. It had started well in a way I had stopped being suspicious of. I'd woken without the low hum of vigilance. Made coffee. Read a message from him about something his sister had said during her pre-defence panic that made me laugh before I'd even sat down.
I had been humming.
At some point in the Henderson review I had been humming, and I noticed it and didn't stop. A person who hummed while working was a person who was not bracing. A person who had stopped spending her cognitive energy on threat assessment and had some left over for tuneless noise.
At noon I looked at my calendar and thought: he gets back from the D.C. site on Saturday. And felt the specific pull of a weekend that would now include something I wa
