She didn't answer him that night.
Not because she didn't have an answer she had been constructing one since the corridor, since the messages, since the dinner and the hair comment and her laugh sounds like yours landing in the middle of a restaurant and rearranging something she had kept carefully in place for four years.
She didn't answer because the answer deserved more than a Tuesday evening restaurant with Stellan's crisis still warm on the table between them.
She drove home. Paid the babysitter. Stood in Seren's doorway for the usual moment, the dark, the breathing, the specific inventory of a mother checking that the most important thing in her world was still exactly where she left it.
Then she went to bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about when.
She called Imara at se
