She woke at four a.m.
This was not unusual — she had a particular brain, one that solved problems overnight and delivered the solutions at inconvenient hours — but this was different from the usual four a.m. The usual four a.m. was: an idea about a design problem, or a line from something she'd been reading, or the ambient restlessness of a body that needed more sleep but had decided otherwise.
This four a.m. was: the thing she'd understood in the corridor.
She was looking at the ceiling, and he was asleep beside her — he was there, in the room she'd spent weeks refusing to share, which had gradually become less refused, the border of it renegotiated so slowly she hadn't noticed the precise moment it happened — and she was looking at the ceiling and the thing in her chest was sitting ve
