They looked up.
The sky was blue and convincing.
"'Trust me,'" he said.
This was, Celia noted, the first time he'd said those words. Every other thing he'd told them had been framed as information. This was different — an appeal rather than a statement, the appeal of someone who had the information but was choosing to offer trust instead of explanation.
She looked at the sky.
Then at him.
"'What do we need,'" she said.
He needed fabric.
This was the first thing.
The explanation was logical. Entirely, infuriatingly logical — the specific, step-by-step rationality of a man who had identified the requirements of shelter construction on a tropical island with nothing but the resources on hand and was now itemizing them in front of six women with the clinical precision of someone who had not noticed, or had noticed and was not acknowledging, that the itemization had specific clothing-related implications.
