~Selene's POV~
On the last night before departure, with the twins finally asleep and Miriam still moving quietly through the spare room folding the last of what will fit into the second suitcase, Selene walks once, slowly, through the apartment she built from almost nothing.
She does not do this with any ceremony attached to it. She has never been a woman who marks endings with speeches, even the private kind, even when no one else is in the room to witness whether she marks them or not. She simply moves through the rooms the way she might check that the stove is off before leaving for the night, methodical, attentive, looking at each thing in its place one last time before the place itself stops being the center of her life.
The velvet box sits on the shelf above the small bookcase in
