All Chapters of His Greatest Regret: Chapter 51 - Chapter 57

SOPHIATeague's email lands while the car pulls away from the hotel. I read it with the city sliding past the window.Coordination calendar attached. Review dates through the borings window are confirmed. Later dates remain provisional pending the authority's procurement sequence.I read it twice. The dates through the borings window are firm. A review opens it on the afternoon of day one, the site inspection falls on day three, and a second review closes it the morning of day seven. Days four through six, the drillers work and nobody needs me in the room. If I stay for all of it, that's six nights, end to end. If I split it, it's three.Five days was my number. The calendar is a night over before the provisional weeks even start.I lock the screen and watch the river go by. There are three conversations waiting for me, and they have to happen in order. Adrian first, because I can't promise anything at home until I know what the office can carry. Then my mother, with real dates this t

SOPHIAThe calendar fills two screens, and I've already given it colors.Blue for the sessions Teague has confirmed. Gray for the later weeks, which he still calls provisional. Below them, in orange, sit the two remote sessions Tarik's office proposed on Tuesday. They stay orange until Teague's own schedule says otherwise.I check the first against the master list. Tuesday the third, ten o'clock, remote, drawing team only. Nadia's structural engineer is in the office that morning, and the session needs nobody on site. It fits.The second takes longer. Thursday the fifth, two o'clock. I lay the drawing team's commitments over it, and a red block appears: the engineer is on another client's site until four.Then I go back to the top and check the confirmed blocks against the authority's own published schedule, line by line. Teague's cover note says the calendar is current as of Monday. It's Thursday. A lot can move in three days.It's a tidy list. Tarik labeled each session with what it

SOPHIAThe children's hospital two towns over keeps a room on Saturdays for parents of kids who have trouble breathing. I've been coming on some Saturdays for a while now. Not because Malik needs the room anymore, but because there are always parents arriving who are where I used to be. Sometimes they need information. Sometimes they just need someone who understands why they haven't slept.The father across the circle has been holding the same paper cup for ten minutes without drinking from it."The nurse says she can't give it to her unless the form's on file," he says. "The form's been on file since September. I watched them scan it.""Scan it where?" someone asks. "Her office or the main office?"He stops. "There's a difference?"Half the room nods. I'm one of them.The family room on the hospital's third floor smells of hand sanitizer and the coffee urn nobody ever cleans properly. Twelve folding chairs, a box of tissues on the windowsill that nobody has touched yet, and afternoo