I slept for four hours.
Real sleep is not the managed unconsciousness of exhausted bodies demanding maintenance, but actual sleep, the kind that arrived because something that had been holding itself rigid for forty days had finally, partially released.
I woke up at six AM. Adrian was already up. Coffee made. The city outside the library window doing its gray morning preparation.
I sat in my chair. Drank my coffee. I didn't check my phone for eleven minutes.
It was the most peaceful eleven minutes I'd had since a bank meeting that felt like another life.
The federal courthouse at nine AM had a different quality than Reyes's building. More formal. More permanent. The architecture of a place where things were made official where the machinery of consequence completed its processing and
