The committee chair had asked her, at the last meeting, whether she supported the project.
She'd said yes. It was the right answer. The project was good. She could list the reasons — had listed them, in fact, in the memo she'd drafted the week before, the one with the subject line she'd rewritten four times because she didn't want it to sound like advocacy.
What she hadn't said, because the question didn't have a shape that could hold it, was that she'd spent three evenings reading the feasibility study and hadn't formed the kind of support he meant. She'd formed something slower. Something that didn't translate to a hand raised at the right moment. She'd found the parts where the numbers relied on assumptions no one had named, and she'd found the parts where the assumptions were probably fine, and the distance between those two findings was where she actually lived.
But "Do you support the project?" doesn't have a pause in it. The verb already knows what it wants. The meeting had eleven people and forty-five minutes left and a decision that would go forward either way, and what he needed was a count.
She'd been counted.
Afterward Kemp said he was glad she'd come around. She didn't correct him. Coming around was close enough to what had happened, the way a nod is close enough to agreement if you've already looked away. She'd provided what the question required. It was smaller than what she knew, but it fit the space. It always fit the space.
She drove home along the river road, where the bridge pilings held up the span they were built into. That was the other meaning of the word, she thought. The structure doesn't choose what it carries. It holds, or it doesn't. Whether it agrees is not a question the weight asks.