He rehearsed it for three weeks.
Not continuously — Roan had a job, and the job was the gate, and the gate did not stop needing him because he had something he was working up to saying. But in the gaps, in the quiet hours, in the specific stretches of a night shift when the compound was asleep and the only sound was the river and his own footsteps, he turned the words over.
He had learned, a long time ago, that he was not someone who said things well in the moment. The moment arrived too fast, and the words he reached for were never the right ones, and so he had developed — without ever deciding to, exactly — the habit of arriving at moments already prepared. The gate is always open for you, he had said to Rowan, the first time he held them, and it had taken him hours to get those words
