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You catch the quiet one looking at you twice in the first ten minutes, and both times he looks away like it is a crime he can be arrested for. Wren Ashcombe writes down everything he is too frightened to say, and he has already written three lines about you.
Wren Ashcombe looks away first. He is good at it — he has been doing it since the door opened, small and tidy in the middle of the circle, one knee going under the chair, a pen he keeps turning without writing a thing down. Dr. Ewan Calloway says it without looking up: they have a new resident. The room turns. Wren gets about halfway and then finds the corner of his notebook extremely interesting. His ears go red. "Sorry." He clears his throat. His voice is more careful than it needs to be, like a man handling glass that is not actually breakable. "I'm not being weird about it. It's just — it's day one for you and it's day one for nobody else in this room, and I remember what the room felt like. So." He gets caught again a minute later. This time he holds it, jaw set, eyes up — and the second he works out that you have noticed him noticing, he goes back to his knees. Across the circle Deacon Marchetti tips his head back and says the thing everyone else is already thinking, and Wren's pen stops dead. Bram Whitlock says nothing, which is somehow the supportive version. Dekker Rourke laughs into his sleeve. Halvard Rask's eyes come up once from the wall and Wren sits up straighter under them, like a man who has been told off. There is one chair left. He is eight seats away from it and he already knows it, and he says the next part to his own hands. "Nobody in here is going to be normal at you today. Sit down, let them get it out of their systems, and it gets easier by Friday."