"Vaughn—" Patrick says, before Margaret pushes open the door to Holy Ground.
"I'm not getting any less sure," Margaret tells him. Orders her usual water. Sits at the table, to Patrick's left, lets her hands rest in her lap, looks at the opposite wall with her face blank.
It's routine. It's fine.
She'd thought there was nothing in her life, as Mainbrace, and then she'd lost being Mainbrace along with anything left of her self-respect, and she had a lot of time on her back in hospital to really wallow in that. Came out the other end hollow but light, like an Easter egg. She'd spent years angry, in the flaring, there-then-gone, mood-swing way of someone constantly pushing the exhausting edge of overwork. She gets regular sleep, now. Sensible working hours.
Only angry in a low, smouldering, banked way, red gleams through the cracks in the burned fuel of her old life.
She can sit here with a poker face on.
"Sorry, excuse me," Patrick says, pausing over the paperwork to frown at his phone, then frowns harder. "Vaughn," he says quietly, "it's Blackshark—"
Messy years-dragged-out custody arrangement. At this time of night, unexpectedly, probably means that the message is percolating through the several connected agencies and law firms, that the kid is not where they're supposed to be.
Margaret gestures with her chin: go. Call, and Patrick hesitates, looking at her, looking at Azoth across the table, and Margaret looks pointedly at the phone in his hand.
"Do apologise, I'm afraid I need to take this now," he says to Azoth, and crosses the bar in long-legged strides, dialling.
Margaret sips her water and goes back to looking at the wall, and Azoth flicks a page of the paperwork back and forth, cross-checking something, and they sit in silence for a minute before Azoth puts the page down, places her palm flat over it, and raises her head just a little.
"I didn't follow you here," she says, quiet, neither defensive nor apologetic. "I ended up here — several reasons. None of them you."
"I didn't think you did," Margaret says — normal volume, polite working tone — and nothing else. She does the mindfulness breathing, and her hands don't clench into fists in her lap, and she sips her water at a measured rate, ignores the way Azoth's fingers twitch on the paper as though she's full of the desire to do or say something.
Patrick comes back, apologetic, and sinks into his seat, trying not to look as if he's looking them over, assessing whether anything happened while he was gone. "The usual," he says to Margaret, a touch wearily, and Margaret nods a little and goes back to looking at the wall, feeling fat and flushed and spiteful inside her impassive skin, feeling the giddy, unreasonable power of withholding attention.
