It happened on a Thursday.
Not Tuesday's strategic clarity, not the working's deliberate structure, not any of the managed architectures she'd been building and inhabiting for weeks. It happened the way the first connection had happened — the way true things happened — in the ordinary space of an ordinary evening, when the house had settled into its rhythms and the conditions had become what they needed to be without anyone arranging them.
She had been in the library since nine.
Not working — she had her research notes open on the table but she hadn't been writing. She'd been thinking about Mira. About a hundred and twenty years inside Ashford Mire. About what it meant to have been taken before the bond could complete and to have survived inside the frame of the man who took you, and to
