And now I was here.
In this dining room with its ancestral portraits and its chandelier and its impeccably set table and the two people whose orbit I had somehow wandered into — one by accident, one by genetics, both of them now irrevocably part of whatever came next.
It wasn't home. I didn't know these people yet — not really, not in the way you know people after time and difficulty and the ordinary accumulation of shared days. But there was something in the room that had room for me in it, and that was more than the Lunar Gardens had offered on the best day.
I finished my soup.
After dinner, Eleanor produced a folder.
"Standard family legal arrangements," she said, handing it to Dax. "My solicitor updated them last month. Miss Cole — you should have independent counsel review anythi
