Not vanity.
Grief.
As if the mirror had reached backward and put him side by side with a version of himself he had lost.
He adjusted the cuff once.
Then stepped away from the glass.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
He smiled without warmth.
“Neither do you.”
In the SUV on the way to headquarters, Greg handed Thomas a sandwich and a bottle of water.
Thomas took them.
He ate like a man trained not to look hungry.
Small bites.
Measured pace.
I hated noticing that.
Hated how much there was to notice once I had finally started.
I looked over at him.
“What happened?” I asked.
He kept his eyes on the window.
“Long version or short?”
“We’ve got twenty minutes.”
He chewed once more, swallowed, then said, “Then you get medium.”
That almost made me smile.
He saw it and ignored it.
“I led a thermal design team at a private aerospace contractor,” he said. “Before that I did graduate work at a top engineering school. Before that I was a kid in Cleveland taking apart window units because my mother couldn’t afford to replace them.”
He said it all without performance.
Just sequence.
“Three years ago,” he continued, “we had a prototype failure on a high-value project. My team had flagged a safety concern. Management overrode it to hit a deadline. The system failed. Investors panicked. Somebody needed to be blamed fast.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“Why you?”
He turned then and looked right at me.
“Come on, Anthony.”
The way he said my name made me feel twelve years old.
I looked away first.
He nodded once.
“Exactly.”
I deserved that.
Still, I asked, “It was really that simple?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing that destroys you is ever simple. It was layered.”
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