Chapter 89

Aria's POV

Gorvan's second letter arrived on a morning when the snow was doing something particular with the light — reflecting it back at the sky in a way that made the world feel briefly doubled, as though everything existed twice.

He'd read my response carefully. His follow-up letter showed it. He'd taken the specific distinctions I'd drawn between transition struggle and orientation adjustment and pushed further, asking about the role of peer relationships in the process. Not teacher observation, which was what most frameworks centered. Peer relationships. Did we track how quickly new students developed meaningful connections with existing students, and did that trajectory correlate with how...