(Sean's POV)
Day four, and Joseph's brought along a colleague for the longer stretch of the drive — another guide, younger, clearly still building up his confidence with tourists, cracking jokes at a rate that suggests he's trying a little too hard to be liked.
Most of them land fine. Jack laughs at all of them regardless of quality, which is its own kind of endorsement, generous and entirely uncritical. I laugh at a couple myself, the genuinely decent ones.
Then he makes one aimed loosely at Connie — something about women and directions, a joke I've heard a hundred clumsy variations of at a hundred dinners over the years, harmless in the way a lot of tired old jokes are harmless, more reflex than malice, the kind of thing that gets a polite chuckle and moves on without anyone examining
