He was quiet for a moment, in the comfortable way. Demerti had always had comfortable silences — it was one of the things she had valued about him from early on, the absence of the anxious-filling-silence quality that most people had in her presence. He did not need to fill the silence. He was simply in it.
"Is something wrong?" he asked, after a while. Not urgently. Gently.
"Nothing is wrong," she said.
"But something is—"
"Something is unclear," she said. "That is different from wrong."
He looked at the sky. "What is unclear?"
She thought about how to say it to Demerti specifically — not in the way she would have written it in a document or analyzed it for herself, but in the way you said things to a person who had been genuinely present for a significant portion of your life and who you did not need to perform for.
"I do not know what I am doing," she said. "Not the daily things. The larger thing."
He was quiet for a moment.
