NEVA POV
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I did not begin with the interference.
Mitch had built the brief that way deliberately, and standing in the chamber, I understood exactly why: you did not open a story about a person with the worst thing that happened to her. You opened with who she was.
"Her name was Elara," I said. "She was twenty-three when her convergence began. She had a laugh that stopped rooms — not because it was loud, though it was, but because it was completely unguarded, the specific sound of someone who had decided, somewhere along the way, that she wasn't going to apologize for taking up space." I looked at Corva, seated in the gallery, and found her steady, present, listening to her friend's story being told correctly for the first time in sixty years. "She grew tomatoes on a third of her ter
