They are in a room that has no name.
Not a boardroom. Not an office. Someone's apartment, the kind rented furnished, lived in temporarily, given back without ceremony. A glass table. Four chairs. A fifth chair someone moved against the wall and did not move back.
There are seven of them. Eight if you count the one who arrived late and has not yet sat down. Nine if you count the one who left twice and came back both times, which most of them have quietly decided not to count.
They are fighting Delaney. There are documents on the table. Someone has been in the middle of a sentence for what feels like a very long time. There is a coffee that has gone cold. There is a name written in the margin of something nobody wants to say aloud.
It is fused to his left palm. This has always been the case; not a wound, not an accident, simply the way he arrived and the way he has stayed. The heart is his own. This is apparent from the specific colour of it, the specific warmth, the fact that it beats in time with him; steadily, without apology, the way something beats when it has been given over entirely to what it believes in.
He cannot set it down. He has tried; not recently, but at points in his life when setting it down seemed like the reasonable thing, the mature thing, the thing a person does when they understand that not every room wants a heart in it. It did not come off.
He stopped trying. He made peace with the visibility of it, mostly. Or he learned to act like he had, which is not the same thing but is sometimes close enough to get through a room.
On his left shoulder there is a cat. Roux. Small. It arrived the way cats arrive — without announcement, without having been invited, without any apparent intention of leaving. It settled where the warmth was. Cats know where the warmth is. They have always known. The cat looks at whatever it wants.
It has not been trained otherwise.
His right hand is flat on the table. His right hand is fine.
Nobody looks at the heart directly. This is not cruelty. This is the specific grace of people who have learned that certain things are better received with peripheral vision. You learn not to stare at the thing a person cannot help. You learn that the person attached to it needs you to keep talking, so you keep talking.
The room doesn't know what to do with that kind of stillness.
It breathes around it carefully.
Delaney arrived composed. She always arrives composed. The coat straight, the collar right; except for one hinge, slightly loose, that only someone paying very close attention would notice. He noticed it in the first thirty seconds. He said nothing.
The cat watches her from his shoulder. It does not blink.
At minute fourteen Delaney clocks the heart.
The gaze moves from the document to his palm and back to the document without breaking the sentence she is in the middle of. She files it. She continues.
At minute nineteen someone says something she cannot argue with.
This does not happen often. It happens now. The room understands that it has happened. There is a pause of the specific kind that means someone has run out of ground. Her eyes go, briefly, almost imperceptibly, to his palm.
She picks up the pen.
Not slowly. Not with declared intention; with the kind that arrives before thought does, that the body makes before the mind has agreed. She throws it across the table and it lands on his heart.
The room does not move. Seven agents and one Delaney and the cat; nobody moves. The pen rests against his palm, against the heart, small and ordinary and wrong. He looks at it. He does not look at her. He does not look at anyone. His lips move, once, briefly; something without sound, something that belongs to him only, addressed somewhere the room cannot follow.
The pen rises and falls with his heartbeat; once, twice. The cat does not move. Delaney looks at her hands.
Outside the window the city continues, requiring nothing from any of them.