NEVA POV
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Mitch did not sit back down.
He stood in the doorway's general vicinity with his chair still rocking slightly behind him, looking at Brinne with the specific expression of a man who had spent three weeks building an elaborate framework of professional pretext around something that had just walked through the door and rendered the framework entirely unnecessary.
"You said Thursday," he said.
"I changed my mind at the second rest stop," Brinne said. "There wasn't a good reason to keep driving toward Thursday when I could just keep driving toward here."
Ziko, still at the table, made a sound that combined delight and disbelief in roughly equal measure.
"That is the most romantic thing a lawyer has ever said in this compound," he announced.
"I've said romantic things," Sil
