I went to the river at four.
Not because I needed to think. I had been thinking since midnight, since Sera's voice saying the word across the kitchen table, since the folder closing and the lamp making its small circle and the five of us sitting with the specific weight of something that had just rearranged the architecture of everything. I had been thinking through the walk upstairs and the door to my room and the mattress and the ceiling and the dark hours between one in the morning and the alarm I no longer needed because my body had learned to wake before it regardless of what the night had contained.
I did not go to the river to think.
I went because the river was the one place on Crimson Ridge territory that had never asked me to be smaller than I was. It did not care about pack h
