"I've been alone for six weeks," she said.
"You've been alone for six weeks without knowing the threat is confirmed and specific and escalating. Now you know. Now I know. Now the calculation changes." He looked at her steadily. "I'm not going to tell you where you can go or how to live. But I'm asking you to let me be closer than corridor-distance until this is resolved."
She looked at him for a long time. The pride, the independence, the genuine fear, and underneath all of it the exhausted relief of someone who had been carrying something enormous alone and had just been offered a pair of hands that were actually capable of holding it.
"Close," she said finally. "Not inside. But close."
"Close," he agreed.
She exhaled — long, slow, carrying six weeks of held tension. "I'm going to make more chai," she said. "And then you're going to tell me what you found in your investigation. Everything. Not the managed version — everything."
"Everything," he said. "I promised."
She went to the kitchen. He looked at the folder on the table — her evidence, her six weeks of careful, lonely work — and felt something that he categorised professionally as respect and personally as something larger than respect and more specific than admiration, for which he did not yet have the correct word.
