There were rules, and the rules had reasons, even when the reasons weren’t explained. He understood that instinctively, and it settled something in him that had been restless since he'd left the Corps. At home, the change was slower to register, but it registered. The new insurance card arrived in the mail on a Thursday.
Thomas held it for a long moment before setting it on the kitchen counter next to Maya’s inhaler. That Friday, he took Maya to a pediatric pulmonologist on the north side of the city, not the urgent care clinic they'd been using where the wait was always two hours, and the doctors changed every visit, but an actual specialist with Maya’s full history printed on a chart. The doctor adjusted her medication, explained the new treatment plan in plain language, and scheduled a follow-up for six weeks out. Maya sat on the exam table swinging her legs, and told the doctor that Gerald the rabbit also had breathing problems.
On the drive home, Maya fell asleep in the backseat, and Thomas watched her in the rearview mirror with the specific kind of relief that doesn’t feel like happiness, so much as the sudden absence of a sound you'd stopped noticing. He told himself, "That was enough." The arrangement made sense, and he could manage it. Cleanly, keep it separate from the rest of his life, compartmentalize the way he had been trained to do.
What he didn’t account for was the evening three weeks in when he was stationed outside the 40th floor conference room Evelyn had arranged for him to be reassigned to a facilities audit role that gave him legitimate access to the executive floors, and he looked through the glass wall, and saw the meeting happening inside. There were seven people at the table, and Evelyn was at the head of it. But, Thomas wasn’t watching Evelyn. He was watching the man to her left, broad-shouldered, silver-haired, with the particular confidence of someone who had spent decades being the most important person in most rooms.
The man's name was Marcus Hale, and Thomas had seen him twice before in passing both times, surrounded by people who moved slightly faster when he was nearby. Right now, Marcus was speaking, and though Thomas couldn’t hear through the glass, he could read the room. Evelyn’s posture had shifted almost imperceptibly, the way a person's posture shifts when they’re containing something they don’t want visible. Thomas filed that observation away, and said nothing to anyone.
The second thing he hadn't accounted for was Ron Bridges. Ron was the kind of supervisor who wasn’t particularly intelligent or particularly cruel, but who paid close attention to patterns because patterns were the only management tool he had. He noticed about two weeks in that Thomas was clocking in on floors he hadn't been assigned to. The facilities audit paperwork covered it officially, but paperwork and reality were different things.
And Ron had been doing this job long enough to know when an explanation was administrative and when it was structural. He stopped Thomas one night near the service elevator on the 22nd floor and looked at him with the flat watchful expression of a man deciding whether to make something his problem. "You’re up on 50 a lot." Ron said. "Audit’s not finished." Thomas said.