Cleo had been gone from Karst for fourteen months when the Commission asked her to speak.
She had lived on the ridge for three years. She had practiced the forgiveness genuinely: not performed it, not coerced into it. The forgiveness was real. She wanted to be clear about that before anything else.
What she had missed was not what she expected to miss.
Not conflict. What she had missed was smaller: the mild satisfaction of being right when someone else was wrong. The quiet pleasure of carrying a grievance for a day, setting it down on her own terms. The small private accounting that ran in the background of any shared life, this person owes me, I owe that person, the ledger roughly even.
In Karst the ledger was always cleared. That was the practice. And the practice worked. She had watched it work on the most entrenched people in the community. She had watched it work on herself. And after three years something in her had become very tired in a way she could not name.
She drove back on a Sunday. There was a petrol station two hours north of the city and she stopped for fuel. One register open, a queue of four people. The man directly ahead of her was taking longer than necessary. She stood there and felt the old interior movement: mild irritation, mild impatience, the small private pleasure of judging a stranger for doing nothing much wrong. It lasted four minutes. When he finally moved and she reached the register she was, inexplicably, in a better mood.
She had sat in her car in the car park for a while after that.
Now she was in an anteroom before the panel and someone had called her name through an open door. Her notes were three pages. The last page ended with the petrol station and then a blank space where the conclusion was supposed to go.
She went in.