Damien noticed something was wrong before she sat down.
He could not have explained how. It was not anything visible in the obvious sense. She walked into the dining room at the same time she always did, dressed the same, notebook under her arm, the same measured pace she used for everything, that walk that managed to be both careful and entirely without apology. Nothing about the surface of her had changed.
But something underneath it had.
He had spent ten days learning the specific quality of Selene's stillness. It was a thing he had done without deciding to, the way you learned the sound of a door in a house you had lived in long enough, not through effort but through accumulated exposure until the pattern was simply there in you and you noticed when it changed. Her stillness was nor
