The house had a different quality during those two days.
Not because anything visible changed. The breakfast table was set at the same time. Margaret conducted her morning calls in the sitting room with the door precisely half open, the way she always did. Victor left for the Whitmore Group offices at eight-fifteen both mornings in the same dark car. Adrian moved through his own orbit without acknowledging mine, present at meals and absent everywhere else, his attention distributed across his phone and his work and whatever interior landscape he maintained behind that controlled exterior.
Nothing changed.
But I moved through it differently.
I was acutely aware, in those forty-eight hours, of every surface I touched and every room I occupied and every conversation I participated in at t
