POV: CHASE
The last day arrives the way last days arrive when you've been not-counting toward them, which is suddenly and with the specific quality of a door that has been ajar swinging open all the way.
I say something thoughtless at breakfast. This is the honest accounting of it, the word thoughtless being accurate rather than apologetic, because what I say is not cruel in the calculated way of the worst of what I'm capable of but is the casual cruelty of a man who has been James for six days and has allowed the specific vigilance that Chase Sterling maintains around his own worst impulses to loosen, and in the loosening has said something that belongs to the category of statements that are true and should not be said, or should be said differently, or should be said with the context that makes them something other than what they sound like without context.
