Chapter 27: Callum Chooses to Be Seen

The plan arrived quietly, the way most of Callum's useful thoughts arrived — not as a sudden illumination but as a recognition, the mental equivalent of turning a corner and finding you had already known what was around it.

He had been sitting in the small library for perhaps another twenty minutes after the last of them spoke. At some point Søren had reached across and moved the empty notebook binding to the floor, not dramatically, just clearing the table the way you clear a table when you are staying awhile. The dismantled pages remained face-down. Priya had not moved to reconstruct or rearrange them, which was the most significant thing she had done all morning. She was sitting with her hands folded on the table in front of her, not writing, not categorizing, simply existing in the room without her usual apparatus, and Callum could see how much it cost her and how she was bearing the cost without performing the bearing of it, which was, he thought, the most genuinely composed he had ever seen her.

Søren was looking at the window. The consistent courtyard. The consistent grey light.