The next morning was grey and quiet.
He had been awake for a while before it did. Lying on his back staring at the ceiling the way he had been staring at it for two days now, except this morning was different from the others because this morning he wasn’t fighting the bed. He wasn’t calculating how quickly he could get upright before Marta noticed. He wasn’t making plans.
He was just lying there. Which was somehow worse.
Sora came in without knocking. She never knocked. She set something on the table by the window and he guessed food, by the smell of it and then she sat in the chair she had claimed as hers since the first day and pulled one knee up to her chest and looked at him.
He didn’t look back.
“Marta’s downstairs,” she said. “She says if you try to get up before she clears you
