I put the phone down after Adrian’s call and sat at the kitchen table for a moment with
the quiet of it. Something worth building. Yes. I thought that was exactly right.
The preliminary hearing was on Thursday. Which meant Wednesday evening was the last
quiet evening before it, and I had been thinking about that all day, the specific weight of
a night before something important.
Adrian had texted an hour later: “You’ll be fine. You’ve been preparing for this for seven
months without knowing it.” Which was, I thought, one of the more accurate things anyone
had said to me in a while.
Ethan was at Noah’s for the afternoon, having gone over after school to work on the bridge
joint, and the hotel suite was quiet in a way that should have felt like an opportunity to
prepare. Instead I
