Chapter 93

Aria's POV

Gorvan left on a Tuesday with three full notebooks and a standing invitation to return.

The notebooks were his — he'd filled them during his four days with us, his small precise handwriting covering pages at a rate that suggested he'd been storing observations continuously rather than recording them in batches. I'd caught glimpses. Fragments of classroom observation, questions to himself, diagrams of things I couldn't fully interpret. The notebooks of someone who trusted his own future self to make sense of what his present self was noticing.

He shook my hand at departure the same way he had on arrival. Direct, brief, complete.

"The document...