❝ there’s a new wrinkle on your forehead, old friend. ❞
natasha, pierre, and the great comet of 1812 starters
From behind his desk, Kingsley peers up at Arthur and tries not to wince. There is a crick in his neck that won’t let up no matter how he stretches. A new wrinkle, indeed. It is another way for looking at the stacks of paperwork and The Prophet on his desk. “It is Frank,” he says.
He gestures to the wall of news-clippings just behind the door, encompassing the map of the British Isles with green pinpricks of light hovering over what must be at least sixty streets in his movement. It is explanation enough. If Arthur examines the wall of clippings more closely, he will find that half of them concern the events of June 8th. Following the hostage situation, a chasm had opened at headquarters whose presence is not betrayed by the absence of Dorcas’s desk, but by the sudden lack of things to say. Since then, days have passed more quickly. A frenetic energy has seeped into them all. It feels thin -- stretched, as if waiting for something to break.
And Frank.
They had a joke, once, in the poor taste that only the very young can manage, that Kingsley will grow old first, Arthur will marry last, and that Frank will die young. It had been forgotten over the years. But now, Kingsley finds himself turning the old words over and over in his mind, as if repetition is enough to smooth the way it catches at his lungs. “You should speak with him.”
