Caleb came on the fourteenth day.
He came in the early evening, when the light was low and specific, and the fortress had moved into the transitional sound between its working hours and its night quiet.
He knocked at my door—not his usual arrival, which tended toward the impression that he had simply always been in the room—and when I opened it, he was standing in the corridor with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before.
Not heavy.
“It’s time,” he said.
He took me to a room I hadn’t been to—a small receiving space in the Lower East Side, away from both the main residential quarters and the formal areas. The room that existed in fortresses as a functional necessity rather than a planned feature: not storage, not an office, not guest quarters, just a space that had accumulated p
