ADRIAN'S POV
The apartment was not what I expected.
I had spent five years trying to locate Clara Moreau, and in those five years the image I had carried of what her life might look like if she was alive, which I had never fully stopped believing had been built from the materials I associated with her: the tentative, the borrowed, the grateful.
The apartment on the eighth floor was none of those things.
It was spare and specific and entirely deliberate, the way spaces look when the person who inhabits them has thought carefully about what they want around them rather than accepting what was available. The drafting table by the window was covered in work that had the concentrated density of someone building something. Drawings were taped to the wall in a child's hand, overlapping and se
