Finally
Aria
I woke up the next morning and nobody had tried to destroy anything overnight.
I checked my phone before I was fully conscious, which had become a reflex over the last three weeks — the specific anxious alertness of someone who had learned that mornings could arrive carrying things. Unknown numbers. Screenshots. Recordings. Filing cabinets. Half siblings. Genealogy results.
Nothing.
Eight hours of genuine nothing.
I put the phone face down and lay there in Caden’s bed in Caden’s room with Caden asleep beside me and let the nothing be everything for a few minutes.
Outside the window Minnesota was doing something that looked almost like proper morning — actual sunlight, the kind that committed rather than suggested, coming through the curtains at an angle that made the ro
