Chapter 118

Aria's POV

The revisions took the summer.

Not the whole summer — there were weeks of other work embedded in it, coordinator correspondence and the ongoing management of the network's daily business and an unexpected situation in one of the newer territories that required three weeks of careful attention before it resolved. But the revisions were the thread that ran through everything else. The thing I returned to in the early mornings before the day's other demands arrived.

The process was different from the drafting. Drafting had been generative — sentences emerging from somewhere that felt like descent, the writing producing understanding I hadn't started with. Revision was...