REBECCA’S POV
The thing about watching someone carefully is that you have to be willing to be boring while you do it.
This was something I had not fully understood until this particular situation required it of me. I had imagined, in the abstract way you imagine things before you have to actually do them, that gathering intelligence about a person’s habits would feel active. Consequential. Like doing something. What it actually felt like was patience, which is slower and less dramatic and considerably more demanding because it requires you to suppress the instinct to move and simply wait instead.
I was good at patience. I had been practicing it for years without knowing it was practice.
Edmund’s patterns, observed over twelve days of careful attention, were more consistent than I had
