Sophia's POV
Winter came slowly that year, the way it always did in the city, the light shifting shorter and colder in careful increments until one morning I woke up and the trees outside the estate windows had gone completely bare.
Life had settled into its own rhythm. Weekdays at the lab working through the second Meritus trial phase, weekends split between the estate and Enough, the small coastal office growing steadily, three more women added to Remy's wall since the opening.
Damien's restructure at BCT had taken root properly by then, the new mentorship program producing its first cohort of junior engineers who spoke about their managers with something closer to respect than fear.
"Dr Park wants to expand the consulting partnership," he told me one evening, sitting across from me
