Before heading back to the Boardwalk, I made a stop I hadn't been planning to skip regardless of how late it was getting.
Margaret and Martin deserved to know what was happening. Not because they were going to get involved, I didn't want that and I was going to make sure of it but because they were living in the same space as us, breathing the same air, and keeping them in the dark about something this significant felt wrong. They weren't soldiers and I wasn't going to treat them like they needed to be protected from information. That was a different kind of disrespect.
So I sat them down and laid it out. Our plan. The alliance with Marlon. What we were moving toward with Callighan. I kept it concise, they didn't need every detail, just the shape of it and when I was done I watched them both sit with it for a moment in the quiet way that people do when they're genuinely processing rather than just waiting to respond.
