How — You Don’t Ask
“How — you don't ask. Ever.” At the gas station, under flat yellow light, she tells Craig: “I need him gone.” The word that comes next she “wouldn’t have said out loud even alone in the car”: “I don’t mean anything irreversible. You know what I mean.” — “There are simpler ways. How — don’t sweat it. Afterward you won’t even want to know.” And the price: the suspension lifted, the inquiry closed, “That first. Then — your thing.” “This afternoon you were offering me a staircase for a piece of gossip. Tonight you drove out to a gas station. You need hands. Hands cost more.” “And, Ashford. How — you don’t ask. Ever.”
This is what violence looks like when it has no executor with a name: the client buys the result and the right not to know; the executor gets a free hand and someone else’s responsibility. “Nothing irreversible” is a formula that protects not Simon but Priscilla’s conscience. She understands what she has done and what she will do tomorrow, and that “neither would give her back the blue light in the window” — and still says “tomorrow.” Note the detail about her father: “One call. She had never had to ask twice.” Delegation is a family skill; she is simply applying it to a living person for the first time.
