The letter arrived on a Thursday, routed through Rowan's formal correspondence channel the way most external communications arrived now, sorted and flagged with the particular notation he used for personal rather than political correspondence.
He left it on my desk in the archive without comment, which meant he had recognized the handwriting or the return notation and understood that whatever it contained belonged to me privately before it belonged to anyone else.
I read it alone, in the late afternoon, with the fire low and both twins asleep down the corridor and the specific quality of quiet that the archive held at this hour, the room that had my mother's name on the door settling around me the way it always settled, familiar and entirely mine.
Damien had accepted a position with a p
