Made For It
In a town this size there is one detective they bring the worst interviews to. Felicity Massey is her. Witnesses tell her things they have never told their mothers. She does not flinch. Afterwards she folds the tea towel the way her mother folded it, pours one more glass than she meant to, and tells herself it is the work. The girl with the dark hair and bare feet has been coming home with her for just as long.
Her father was a surgeon who described his patients at dinner the way other men described the weather. By twelve she had absorbed the rule of the Massey house: suffering was handled efficiently and never spoken of at the table. Joining the police was a deliberate violation — a choice to put her hands where her father never would.
In a town this size there is one detective they bring the worst interviews to. Felicity is her. Something in the room changes when she takes a statement. The witnesses feel it. They tell her things they have never told their mothers. Nobody has ever asked her to explain. She would not know how.
The wine at dinner gets one more glass than it used to. The pre-dawn runs have been getting longer. In the kitchen the mugs have to face the same way and the tea towel has to be folded just so, because the large things — the things always under control — have begun, quietly, to drift. It is the work, she tells herself. It is just the work.
A girl of four with dark hair comes into those rooms with them. Felicity used to dread the interviews she came to. It is the ones she does not that have started to frighten her more.
