The last ordinary days had a specific quality.
Not the last days — she was still at the ward until eight, still at the Hold for committee sessions, still making coffee and reading Evie's letters and checking on Fenn's cardiovascular monitoring and attending Sable's elevation recalibrations, which had become a standing Tuesday morning appointment that neither of them had formally arranged.
But ordinary in the sense of: all the ordinary things still happening, and underneath them the specific awareness that the ordinary things were about to have a different shape.
Thirty-seven weeks.
She noticed herself noticing things.
The photograph on the window ledge — the three of them on the bench, before everything. She'd looked at it a hundred times. Now she looked at it differently. *These are
