Vane came down for breakfast at seven-thirty.
Lena heard him before she saw him — the careful, measured footsteps of a man descending an unfamiliar staircase in an unfamiliar house, the specific quality of someone who had spent the night in a guest room and was now navigating the social geography of a household he didn't yet understand.
She was at the stove. Jax had ceded the morning's cooking to her with uncharacteristic grace — "you should be the one who's there," he'd said, which she'd understood as its own kind of strategy, the deliberate choice of who occupied which space at which moment, made not by committee but by the specific intuition the configuration had developed for these things.
Vane appeared in the doorway.
He was dressed more casually than the charcoal coat had suggest
