The penthouse was different without the emergency.
I noticed that evening the way the rooms felt when there was no phone call expected, no document to review, no federal timeline creating its own gravitational field.
The quiet had a different quality than the operational quiet of the last three weeks. That had been the silence between actions.
This was just silence. Ordinary. Unstructured. The kind that required you to fill it with something that wasn't a crisis, and I was distantly alarmed to realize I wasn't certain I remembered how.
Adrian was in his studies. I was in the library. We had arrived home from the federal building at noon, eaten something that Marcus had arranged to be delivered with the cheerful efficiency of a man who expressed care through logistics, and then done
