"I'm not uncertain," he said. "I'm professional."
She gave him the look that had been getting more specific over the weeks. "Sit down. Look at the ward seven data and tell me what you think."
He sat down. He looked at the data. It was — as everything she did was — thorough, well-constructed, and sharp in ways that would make the committee uncomfortable. He went through it carefully, which took forty minutes, during which the chai cooled and was reheated and the afternoon light shifted across the office floor. He had three observations — one genuine structural improvement and two about presentation for a committee audience looking for reasons to contest it. He told her all three.
She listened. She asked questions — specific ones, the questions of someone following the logic rather than defending against it. She pushed back on one of his points, correctly, with data he hadn't looked at, and when he reviewed it he changed his recommendation. She made another note.
"The second observation, about the presentation — you're right that the committee will look for a simplification argument. But if I simplify the way you're suggesting, I lose the nuance that's actually doing the work. The correlation isn't linear and the committee needs to understand why."
"You're right," he said. "Don't simplify. Build a one-page explainer that addresses the non-linearity directly, at the front of the presentation. Frame it as a feature, not a complication."
She looked at him. "That's better than what I had." She made another note. Then she sat back and looked at the screen and said: "You're good at this."
"At policy analysis?"
"At reading things that matter," she said. "Reports, people, situations. The water distribution problem — you read it the first day. Rohit — you read him before I was willing to. The aide." She paused. "You see things accurately. That's different from being good at your job. It's something about how you're constituted."
He looked at her. "You see things accurately too," he said. "The accounts. Alone, without anyone to confirm it, you read the structure correctly and then spent six weeks not letting anyone manage you out of what you knew." He paused. "That's the same quality. Just applied differently."
