ROWAN
I do not go looking for her.
I establish that as policy at nine o'clock, seated at my desk, with the Lila problem laid out in front of me in its current form, which is a phone containing forty-seven unread messages and one engagement that exists on paper in the second drawer of this desk like a live round someone left in a cleared weapon. The problem can no longer be deferred. There is a child in the equation now. Every calculation in this pack just changed its base, and Lila is a variable I have allowed to float for three weeks on the theory that starving her of response would make her careless, and the theory holds, but theories do not sign papers, and the paper needs to burn, formally, publicly, soon.
So I am going to sit at this desk and think the sequence through properly. The council. The timing. The wording. I am not going to go looking for her.
I go looking for her at nine fifteen.
