Chapter 8 What We Choose

• Preston didn't come back to work for three full weeks. When he finally did, he was civil in the brittle, careful way of a man building a wall brick by brick in real time in front of you — polite in meetings, entirely absent everywhere else, never once looking directly at me if he could help it.
• It wasn't forgiveness. I hadn't let myself expect it to be. Some wounds don't close simply because the people who caused them decide, eventually, that it's inconvenient to keep bleeding.
• There was one moment, in the third month, when I passed him alone in the executive kitchen and he actually spoke to me— not the brittle professional courtesy he'd perfected for meetings, but something quieter, almost tired.