She glanced away, doing the count in her head without much enthusiasm. Eight years. Maybe nine. She was not entirely certain — the number had blurred somewhere along the way, the same way a lot of things had blurred. From the moment she had begun preparing Samuel in earnest, transferring responsibility piece by piece, teaching him how to read a room and read a document and read a person, the system had simply gone quiet. Vanished, more or less completely. The few times it had surfaced since were so brief and so unremarkable that she could not have described the circumstances if asked.
Eight years of silence, and it had chosen now to reappear.
She looked at it again.
"You have terrible timing," she said.
