By morning, eight was still there in the notebook.
Wren had looked at it before dawn, not because she needed to confirm the number existed, but because some decisions felt less stable until they survived the dark. Twelve months had been a plan. Eight months was not a plan yet. It was a warning written in her own hand, a measure of how quickly the ground beneath her had begun to move.
She had not slept well.
That was not new. The bond had been disrupting her sleep since the first week, and she had developed a workable relationship with four hours of sleep and early rising because the morning shift had always required a body to function before the mind finished catching up. What was new was the specific quality of the disruption: not the directional pull toward the northwest corner of the
