Chapter 9: Return
Tessa came home on a weekday afternoon without press and without a convoy that would announce itself to the neighborhood.
She stood in the doorway of the house she had left as a staged fugitive and looked older in the way missions make people older. We did not perform a reunion for any audience. I made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table where she had done homework at thirteen, and for a long time we said very little about courts. She told me which parts of the cloned-token theory the forensic team had already locked down. I told her which directors had held and which had wavered. When the practical inventory was finished, she said, “Mother called me a stray dog on television.”
“I heard.”
“I’m not asking you to fix her.”
“I couldn’t if I tried.”
Tessa nodded once. “I need to go back to work when the protocol clears. Not because I’m proving something to Celeste. Because the job is still the job.”
May you like
“The job is still the job,” I agreed.
That night I took the crushed eagle out of my pocket and set it on the desk beside the unsigned replacement order. I left both there. Decisions about insignia could wait for a morning that was not defined by someone else’s heel.
