SOFIA
The light in the east wing always turned a pale, sickly yellow just before the sun dipped below the tree line. I watched it crawl across the mahogany surface of the table, illuminating a stray thread on my sleeve, a smudge of ink on a ledger, and the motionless hands of the man sitting opposite me. In the past, this specific time of day had felt like a countdown, a tightening of the chest as the evening hours approached, bringing with them the inevitable weight of shared confinement. But today, the light was just light. It didn't signal a beginning or an end. It was simply a physical property of the room.
The shift didn’t happen all at once.
It settled in gradually, the way everything else in the house did quietly, without announcement, until it became the new structure. It was l
