While he waited for the kettle to boil, Kieran pressed both his palms against the countertop, leaned against it, and sighed. He had an absent wish that he'd lied to her, or at least delayed — he didn't know if he was up for this, was the thing. He didn't talk about it, ever, not in detail. He hadn't planned out how he was going to anonymize it, although he was — if anything in the account could lead directly to Topaz Urquart, then the Ministry wouldn't stop until they found him.

He couldn't conceptualize anything past this interview, though; he was going to wait for the kettle to whistle, bring it back to the coffee table, and then: it was blank. An interview would happen, or maybe it wouldn't — maybe he wouldn't be able to get through it, and Juliana would think differently of him forever, and it would all be for nothing. He tugged at the ends of his shirtsleeves. The kettle whistled.

The kettle whistled. Kieran plucked it up and brought it back to the main room of the flat with him; he set it down on a knit potholder and settled back into his same space on the couch. He tugged on his sleeves again when she ran through things. "That sounds good," Kieran said, his mouth dry, "Can you ask a question?"

He didn't know where to start; a burn on his side, waking miles from where he should, the conviction that he'd done something terrible. That felt like the start, but it wasn't all the context, was it?

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