The forty minutes

The five o'clock today. The one where almost nothing happens for weeks and then forty minutes of something real arrives with no warning at all. I am not going to write down what it was. But she said a thing about her mother that she has been circling since February, and she said it flatly, like a fact she had just noticed on her way past, and then she looked at me to see what I would do with it. What I did was nothing, deliberately, for about four seconds. And then said the smallest possible version of what I was thinking. And it held. This is the part of the job nobody outside it understands. People imagine it is advice. It is almost entirely about not flinching at the right moment, and about having spent four months being boring enough that the flat sentence has somewhere safe to land. Drove home with the radio off. I am good at this. I want that written down somewhere it counts, because I spend a lot of my time not letting myself think it and then wondering why I feel like an imposter at the ten o'clock.