I went to the kitchen.
Tea. The kettle. The ritual that had become, across everything this compound had lived through, the one constant.
I sat at the table with the cup in my hands and I thought about Elara.
About a laugh that stopped rooms. About tomatoes and stubbornness in the wrong places and flexibility in the right ones. About a woman who had known something was wrong and had said, *I don't have time to be wrong right now, there's too much building left to do,* and had died three weeks later without finishing.
I thought about what it meant to be the one who finished it.
Not mystically. Not as destiny — I'd stopped believing in destiny somewhere around the fourth crisis this story had thrown at me, replaced it with something more practical: the specific accumulated weight of choi
