"Know what that's like," I said.
"Yes."
I looked at Reine — this precise, brilliant woman who had walked through a gate with one bag and had been building something real inside this compound for months and still, sometimes, stood in a corridor trying to figure out how to ask for help.
"You don't have to ask Vael," I said. "I can tell you."
She looked at me.
"Does it stop feeling like something's missing?" I said. "Not completely. Not in the way where you stop noticing the shape of what was there." I paused. "But the missing becomes — background. Not the loudest thing anymore. And what fills the foreground is what you're actually building, not what you left."
She held my gaze.
"When does the foreground take over," she said.
"Different for everyone," I said. "For me it was—" I though
