I don't know how long we stayed like that.
That was the strange part, the part I noticed in the way you notice something that doesn't fit the established pattern of yourself. I am a man who always knows the time. Not because I check it constantly, not because I'm a slave to the clock in any anxious sense, but because time has always been a resource I managed with the same precision I applied to everything else. Minutes matter. Hours matter. The distance between where you are and where you need to be matters, and you don't get there without tracking the interval. It's not something I decided. It's just how I'm built.
But sitting there in the amber quiet of the hidden room, with her weight against my chest and her breathing gradually slowing to something even and deep, I lost the thread of
