DUKE POV
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The sketchbook was full.
Duke had known it was coming for weeks — the pages getting shorter toward the back, the specific feel of a book with twenty pages left, then ten, then five. He'd been rationing the remaining pages the way you rationed something finite when you weren't ready for the end yet, but even rationing couldn't stop it arriving.
He filled the last page the morning after the Wren Aldis call.
He drew the back room — not the meeting, the morning after, the specific quiet of a space that had been through something and was resting. Mitch's chair empty for once, coffee cup at the angle of someone who'd stepped out. Ren's carry-cradle visible through the door, the morning light on it. The wall where Ryke's hand had once rested next to Neva's — not a photograph, ju
