The morning after our retreat felt like coming back into a world that had been briefly rearranged by quiet hands. The mansion welcomed us with its usual hush, but now the hush had weight—an understanding that we had gone away and returned with a little more of ourselves intact. Conley moved through the house with his familiar efficiency, but there was an easy lightness to him that hadn’t been there for months. Angel hummed to herself in the conservatory, cross-referencing the incubator’s emerging metrics with donor feedback. I dressed slowly in the small privacy of my room, smoothing my skirt along the line of my hip until the fabric took the shape I wanted it to hold.
You learn to treat visibility as a tool; a good outfit is a kind of armor. Today I chose a tailored dress that read compe
