Ripple Effect

Chapter Two: ...permission slip.

Elizabeth held up her hands and leant back in her seat. "Fine, whatever, but when it arrives and you realise that you'd rather have whatever I'm having, I'm not swapping, not again."

"Fine."

Elizabeth tipped her head towards the waiter, and when he returned to the table, she handed him the menu. "He'll have the salmon, and I'll have the pasta."

"Certainly, ma'am. Anything else to drink?"

Elizabeth glanced at Will, and he shook his head. She looked up at the waiter. "We'll stick with water, thanks."

A glass—or three—of red would certainly take the edge off the meal, but who knows, she might end up signing away Alaska.

Chatter floated through the main dining hall like dandelion seeds buoyed on a summer's breeze, but in the booth the silence dragged with the weight of damp air. The flames of the candles that hung from the manzanita tree flickered; they wavered one second, and flared the next, governed by the whims of the unseen, proof of all that is felt but not known. She should have tired of these conversations long ago, yet something bound her and Will together in this push and pull, this struggle to fend off the darkness and to salvage even a glimmer of light. Were people any different from the candles on the tree, or were they just flames to the winds of fate?

"So, are you going to tell me what's going on with you and Sophie?"

"No."

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at him.

Will picked up his dessert spoon and studied it as he turned it over and over. "There's nothing to tell. Sophie had some time off, and they haven't been back in a while, so she's taken Annie to visit her family."

"And you didn't go with them?"

"I had to work." The spoon stilled and his gaze darted up to meet hers. "You know work. I might not be in charge of triggering nuclear holocaust, but I still think my job's pretty important. I might even be training the doctors who one day treat the people you nuke."

Elizabeth stared him hard in the eye. "Nice deflection."

He reflected the look back at her. "It's what we do, right?"

They paused for a beat, and then broke into simultaneous smiles.

A waitress approached the table, a wicker bread basket draped in an ivory napkin balanced in the crook of her arm. She peeled back the cloth cover and offered the basket to Will first, but he shook his head and raised the fingers of one hand, and so she turned to Elizabeth, who peered into the basket and then plucked one of the poppy seed rolls from amidst the nest of petit pains.

Elizabeth tore the roll apart, sending a spray of poppy seeds skittering over the side plate, and as she folded a chunk of the still-warm bread into her mouth, Will eyed her with a look that landed somewhere between amusement and disdain, his tongue poised, as though he was fighting to restrain whatever snark had popped to mind.

"What now?" she said through her mouthful. The fluffy bread melted on her tongue.

"Nothing." He dismissed her with a flap of his hand, but when she widened her eyes at him, he continued. "Just—bread and pasta? I didn't realise you'd taken up marathoning."

"You'd be feeling carby too if you'd had a morning like mine."

"I'm sensing it's more than just the Russians."

She paused to dislodge a poppy seed from between her teeth using the tip of her tongue. "Just one of those days." Though when was the last time it hadn't been just one of those days? She let out a soft snort and shook her head to herself. "You know I've been up since three AM every day this week, and I thought that maybe I could arrange something nice for this weekend just to give me the strength to drag myself through, but my own daughter—who I gave birth to, without an epidural I might add, because she insisted on arriving during a snowstorm—would rather hang out with the White House Chief of Staff than with me; work has been non-stop and if I sit down for so much as two seconds, someone pops up out of nowhere with some new disaster that only I can deal with, and it needed to be dealt with five minutes ago, by the way; then I'm trying to get to the elevator so I can at least make it here on time and have a full hour's break from the office, when I'm pounced on at least three times by three different people all with some document or other requiring my urgent attention. Plus—" She she let out a long sigh. "—I gave Henry my muffin."