Maren read through the night.
I knew this because at some point I left Darius in the library — both of us choosing, without discussion, the particular maturity of not spending every night in each other's rooms just because the want was there — and passed the study on my way back and saw the lamp burning and heard the specific quality of Maren's silence. The silence of someone reading something that is reorganizing their understanding of what they thought they knew.
Maren being wrong was something the editorial part of my brain had flagged as overdue.
Watching it happen in real time was something else entirely.
She found me in the kitchen before I'd finished my first coffee. She had her walking stick and three folders — actual paper folders, the old kind, which she apparently produced w
