He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 227

Chapter 227

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Chapter 227

Selina’s POV

The floor of the hallway was a different kind of difficult from what I had expected.

Not physically… What I had not expected was the particular, grinding quality of the work itself.

Mopping a floor

Not mopping a floor once, mopping the same floor, day after day, in the narrow window between the end of lunch and the beginning of the afternoon schedule, on the understanding that the floor would be dirty again by evening and would need to be mopped again in the morning.

The Sisyphean quality of maintenance work… the way the completion of it was not a completion but a pause, the way the effort produced a result that was immediately in the process of being undone.

I had organised people to do this work for me for twenty years.

I was now those people

The other inmates had established their relationship with me in the first week and had not revised it.

Not violent…. not most of the time.

Meals were the primary instrument. Someone always ahead of me in the line. Someone always beside me who found a reason to occupy more of the bench than the bench required. Someone who looked at the food on my tray with the expression of someone who had decided it was available to them regardless of whose tray it was on.

I had learned, after the incident with the first complaint…. which had produced a new charge and had changed the geometry of what was possible… to absorb these things without responding to them in the ways my instincts recommended.

I kept working.

I kept quiet

I kept the management tools packed away in whatever part of me still had access to them, because I had finally understood, after weeks of trying to deploy them in this environment, that they operated on the assumption of a social contract that did not exist here.

The bucket

I had spent forty minutes on the hallway floor.

Not forty minutes of uninterrupted mopping…. forty minutes of the iterative work of doing something that required attention to the detail, that would show the result of insufficient attention, that would be checked by an officer at the end of the window.

I had done it correctly

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Chapter 22

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The inmate who knocked the bucket did not look at me when she did it….

That was the thing I noted…. not the bucket, not the water spreading across the floor I had just finished, not the laughter from the two women who had been watching from the junction at the end of the corridor. The fact that she did not look at me.

It was not from carelessness.

It was from the understanding that I did not require acknowledgment.

That I was the floor.

I started again…..

Lowered my head

Put the mop back in the bucket.

Began again.

The laughter faded as people moved on to other things…. it had not been aimed at me specifically, I understood that now, the way I understood many things in here that had taken time to understand. It had been produced by the situation, by the bucket and the water, by the comedy of effort undone. I could have been anyone.

I happened to be me.

I mopped.

The officer’s voice at five.

My name

The small office.

The officer across a desk with a file in front of him, open to a page I couldn’t read from my angle.

“There has been an update,” he said.

I straightened

“Your court hearing has been scheduled,” he said. “Two days”

Two days.

I looked at the wall behind him.

“The hearing,” I said.

“Your counsel will have the full notification,” he said. “This is the informal heads-up.”

“What charges will be addressed?”

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Chapter 22

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“That’s a question for your counsel,” he said. “I can tell you the date and the time.”

He gave me the date

He gave me the time.

He closed the file.

I was escorted back to the cell….

The cell at night.

I lay on the cot.

Two days.

The hearing.

The charges were not unknown to me…. Caldwell had walked me through them, carefully, across two separate conversations that had produced two separate lists of what existed and what could be negotiated and what was immovable.

The medical interference charges were the primary structure. The cooperation on the Edwin Hargrove investigation had been offered and had produced the movement Caldwell had described, not elimination of consequence, reduction of consequence, the specific, negotiated language of a system that understood that information had value and was prepared to assign value to it.

Two days.

Not enough time for the cooperation to be fully processed

Too much time for the cell.

I thought about the choices

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