She smiled, though deep in that smile was the weight of loss, and the whole room read it: Mrs. McDowell regrets to inform you that you are full of shit.

Silence in the room. One of the fluorescents had gone out, so shadows haunted the place. The batch of them faced the woman, who wore no makeup, as she hadn’t had time to put it on, who sat before them in dumpy jeans and a Boys’ Latin T-shirt, her cheap reading glasses slightly askew. Her hair had looked better, as had she. But none of that mattered. Only her reaction mattered.

“Is it a feeling you have?” asked Nick. “Or is it something specific?”

“It’s that I love everything about it except it.” Then she said, “Do all of you love it? Do you have any doubts?”

“I will not let them answer,” said Nick, “because that would give you a frame in which to couch your own objections, and that is of no use to us. What is only of use to us is what you bring to it.”

“I will try to put into words what I feel,” she said. “If you find value in it, that’s well and good. How much time do we have?”

“Don’t worry about that. Time is our concern, not yours. No one here will look at a watch, no one will sigh.”

Swagger realized how professional Nick could be. It must have killed him to say such a thing, for indeed time was clicking away, remorselessly, as it was now 1440, and the thing would happen—or so they reckoned—at 1500. Each second made any kind of response to anything she said more unlikely.

“Do you want a Coke? A cup of coffee?” asked Nick.

“Get the Coke,” said Swagger. “The coffee here sucks.”

Everybody laughed. Maybe that helped a little.

“I’m fine,” she said. Then she said, “His mind doesn’t work like that.”

They waited for an amplification, but nobody said a word to rush her. They found the discipline to let her form her own words in her own time.

“I have been on this guy since he killed my son. That’s over fifteen years. I have learned a little. Not much.”

What had she learned?

“It’s too straightforward. You’ve concluded he wants to kill Mogul. Even if you didn’t want to say it, or were prevented from saying it, your country’s history forced you to think that he wanted to kill Mogul.”

She was right. Maybe Nick had been wrong. Maybe in suppressing that interpretation he had made it all the more inevitable.