She had heard her husband's voice say it. She had heard the voice of the man who had cried when she'd shown him the pregnancy test, who made terrible jokes when they ordered food, who ended work calls the moment she raised her eyebrows — she had heard that voice in a park toilet stall saying the specific, precise words that had always lived at the back of her skull in the particular space reserved for fears that were too formless to name.
She needed air.
She pushed through the door.
'Inside.'
Raven snapped his fingers again.
The sound barrier that had been sitting around the adjacent stall — the specific, invisible acoustic boundary of his making — dissolved.
The adjacent stall:
Vikram.
Who had been existing in the specific, miserable, isolated world of a man dealing with a digestive emergency, entirely cut off from the rest of the park, entirely unaware of everything that had been happening eighteen inches away on the other side of the stall divider.
