I am outside the interview room for two hours and fourteen minutes.
Reth stands with me for the first forty minutes and then removes himself to the operations room because there is work and because he understands, in the fifteen year shorthand we have, that my standing outside this door is not about security. It is about the specific, unperformed necessity of being within range of something that matters.
Marcus replaces Reth at the hour mark. He does not say anything. He leans against the opposite wall with his arms folded and his newspaper, which he is not reading, and we stand in companionable silence while the interview happens behind a door neither of us is going through.
At the ninety minute mark Marcus says, "She's good in there."
"I know," I say.
"You knew before you met her,"
