Autumn arrived gently, as if the year itself had finally learned how to lower its voice.
The light softened first. Then the air. Then the long edges of the days, which stopped feeling like corridors we had to move through at speed and became, instead, rooms we were allowed to remain inside. In the Alpha house, the last sharp traces of wartime posture had thinned into ordinary vigilance. Transfer documents still moved across desks. Reconstruction still required attention along the eastern depth. But the house no longer held its breath between one hour and the next, and neither did we.
I noticed the change most in the mornings.
Tristan woke slower now. Not carelessly—never that—but without the immediate inventory of threat that had once pulled him from sleep as if the dark itself might ha
