Chapter 19: What Applied Silence Is Actually Teaching

Søren was already awake.

This was not surprising — Callum had begun to suspect that Søren slept the way certain animals were said to sleep, with one hemisphere alert and the other merely resting, some essential attention always maintained. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in the room two doors down from Callum's, fully dressed, writing something in the small spiral notebook he kept in his left breast pocket. He looked up when Callum appeared in the doorway and did not look surprised, which was also not surprising. Søren very rarely looked surprised. He looked, instead, like someone who had been waiting to see which door a thing would come through.

Callum held up his notebook, open to the last entry. The four-inch displacement. He had drawn a small diagram: the mattress edge, the notebook's original position, the notebook's current position, the gap between them rendered in careful hash marks as if measurable distance could confer meaning.