Friday morning arrived with the kind of quiet that precedes significant things.
Mia woke at six on Sarah's couch and lay still for a moment, feeling the shape of the day before it had happened. Nathan would be in a boardroom in two hours. She would not be in the room. She had no control over what happened inside it — not who spoke first, not how Ethan responded, not which questions Nathan chose to ask and in what order. That was the specific discipline this entire case had required of her from the beginning: knowing which rooms were hers and which belonged to other people, and refusing to spend energy on the distinction.
She had learned it slowly. She was getting better at it.
She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and opened the Riverside Charter welcome packet — she had been re
