There was a difference between being alone and being unaccompanied.

Amara had spent years mastering the first.

Now she was learning the second.

And it was far more complicated.

The morning began without urgency.

No meetings stacked back-to-back. No panels waiting to dissect her words. No strategy calls disguised as casual conversations.

Just quiet.

She woke before sunrise, as she often did now, and stood by the window with a cup of tea she didn’t really want. The city stretched endlessly below, alive in that muted pre-dawn way where everything felt suspended between intention and motion.

There was a time when mornings like this felt like victory.

Proof she had...