Closer
FARAH Morning comes late. Not because the sun is slow, but because the palace is still moving long after the night should have ended. I wake to the quiet kind of noise that means activity — footsteps in corridors, doors opening and closing, voices kept deliberately low. It has a different rhythm from the usual mornings here. Tighter. More purposeful. He moved on the information. For a moment I lie still in the bed, staring at the ceiling the way I did when he left, my thoughts circling the same place they circled last night — the look on his face in the lamplight, the pause in the doorway, the way his hand tightened on the frame like he had to physically stop himself from doing something he hadn’t decided how to do yet. Then the practical part of me pushes the rest aside. If he acte
- Writer
