Chapter 4

The mood had been on her since morning.

She couldn’t have named what triggered it. That was the thing about the dark ones — they didn’t announce themselves or arrive with a reason she could argue with. They just settled in sometime around dawn and made the apartment feel like a waiting room she’d been sitting in too long.

She knew the shape of these days. They came without warning and without logic and the only thing to do with them was move through them the way you moved through bad weather — keep your head down, maintain forward progress, don’t make any decisions you’d have to live with later.

She’d been at the window since seven.

The June Gloom was thick today, not burning off the way it usually did by noon, just sitting on the city flat and gray and permanent feeling. The street below was doing its Saturday thing — dog walkers, a couple with a stroller, a kid on a bike making the same loop over and over. Normal people doing normal things in a normal world that had somewhere along the line stopped feeling like hers.

She was forty-five years old and she was sitting at a window watching other people have a Saturday.

The thought arrived without invitation and she put it away without ceremony and watched the kid on the bike make another loop.

Rika moved through the apartment behind her. Quietly, the way she moved through everything. Melissa could track her by sound — soft steps in the hallway, the barely audible slide of a kitchen drawer, the stillness that meant she’d stopped and was doing something that required concentration. She didn’t ask how Melissa was doing. Didn’t suggest they go outside. Didn’t perform concern or cheerfulness or anything that would have required Melissa to respond to it.

She just moved through the apartment and let Melissa be.

That was the thing about the dark days and Rika — there was nothing to push against. On the dark days Melissa’s default was to find something to be irritated about, to locate the friction in her environment and lean into it until the irritation crowded out whatever was underneath it. It wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism and she knew it wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism and it worked well enough that she’d never seriously tried to replace it.

Rika gave her nothing to be irritated about.

The apartment was exactly as it should be. The coffee was exactly right. Everything in its place, everything functioning, the small machine of her daily life running smoothly and without drama.

She couldn’t even be irritated about that because being irritated about someone doing their job well was insane and she was not, whatever else she was on days like this, insane.

By ten o’clock she gave up on the window and went to her desk.

The consulting work was a report on logistics vulnerabilities in forward operating base supply chains — dry material that required her full attention and rewarded her for giving it by demanding more. She’d done three of these in the past year, each one pulling on a different piece of her operational knowledge, each one reminding her that her brain still worked even when her body had become a different kind of problem.

She worked for two hours and produced something she’d have to rewrite and knew it and kept going anyway because forward progress was the only kind she believed in.

At noon Rika appeared in the doorway of the study with a plate and set it on the corner of the desk without comment — something light, the cold noodle dish she’d made twice now and that Melissa had not told her she liked, which meant Rika had simply noticed she ate more of it than other things and drawn the obvious conclusion.