December arrived the way it always did in New York—quietly at first, then all at once, as if the city had simply decided it was finished pretending autumn was still in charge.
Lena noticed it on a Wednesday morning.
Not because anything significant had happened, but because she stepped outside with her coffee and the air met her in a way that was sharper than November had been. Cleaner. More decisive. The kind of cold that didn’t negotiate.
She stood for a second on the sidewalk outside the building and looked down the street, watching people move with collars turned up and hands buried in pockets, all of them moving like they understood the rules of the month without needing to be told.
Then she kept walking.
Her life had developed a rhythm now that no longer required conscious maint
