He is unreachable for two hours after the hearing.
I do not push. I go back to the building, I go to the project room, I spread my materials across the table and I work, or I do the thing that looks like working while most of my attention is on the door.
At six o’clock he comes in.
He does not look like himself. He looks like himself with something underneath disrupted, like a structure that is still standing but is no longer certain of its foundations. He sits down across from me and he looks at the table for a moment and then he looks at me.
I say: “Do you want coffee?”
He says: “No.”
I close the blueprint in front of me. I fold my hands on the table. I wait.
He says: “She had no right to use that in a council chamber.”
“No,” I say. “She did not.”
“She has known about my father
