Let’s talk about this like adults, let’s not do anything we’ll—”

Ada. He hadn’t called me that in years — it was the name from the good time, the rooftop name, and he reached for it now the way a drowning man reaches for anything that floats.

I understood exactly what he was doing.

He was running the play that had always worked: the soft voice, the intimate name, the appeal to maturity that somehow always ended with me managing his feelings and apologizing for my own.

I had watched him do it to Dagny an hour before, watched it fail, watched the cold thing come out from under it.

And standing in that jet bridge, I felt the old pull of it — the trained reflex of twelve years to soften, to smooth, to make the peace — and then I felt it let go of me, all at once and for good.