Chapter 83: What She Wants

Val came back in twenty-three minutes.

She had said twenty. She didn’t apologize for the extra three. She came through the door with both hands occupied—something from the kitchen, not arranged on a tray but carried the way you carry things when you went to get one item and found three others that seemed relevant. She set them on the nightstand with the confidence of someone who has decided that the nightstand belongs to the project and the project is Raven getting through the afternoon, and then she pulled the corner chair back to the bedside and sat in it like she’d never left.

Raven watched her do all of this. In the twenty-three minutes since Val had gone, she had finished the Pier Eleven report, read the second summary Sebastian had clipped behind it, and made a list of three questions she needed answered before she could form a position on the corridor strike. The list was on the back of the first page in the margins. It was not long but it was precise, and making it had cost more concentration than it should have, which was information about where her recovery stood. She filed this without judgment and set the report aside.

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