She kept the promise. It took her four days longer than she'd told Afisa it would, but she kept it — called on a Sunday afternoon with nothing else competing for her attention, no borehole crisis demanding to be solved first, no class to hide behind, just the conversation itself, finally given the room it needed.
"Okay," she said, once the ordinary catching-up had run its course. "Tell me about the promotion. All of it. Not the version you gave me when you were trying to be gentle about quitting on us."
"I wasn't trying to quit on you."
"I know. That's not what I meant." Zarina pulled her knees up onto the couch, settling in for a conversation she'd been avoiding structuring properly for over a week, ashamed, faintly, of how much easier it had been to solve a borehole crisis than to sit
