~Selene’s POV~
The velvet box is in her left coat pocket.
It is always in her left coat pocket on appointment mornings — this has become a fact of the same order as the appointment itself, unremarkable in its constancy, noted only in the way that reliable things are noted: by the small internal register of their presence. The box's nap is worn now at the edges where her fingers have rested against it for seven months. Inside it, four pieces of paper in the order they became real. She does not need to open it to know what is there.
Dr. Amara's nine o'clock.
The walk is twelve minutes from the apartment, four blocks east and two north, through the part of Silvermere that wakes slowly in the late autumn mornings — the café on the corner not yet at full capacity, the market stalls half-ass
