Chapter 98

Aria's POV

The final journals arrived in early summer.

Sixteen weeks of accumulated observation, reflection, and revision, bound together by the discipline of regular writing and the particular honesty that develops when you've been doing something long enough to stop performing and start recording.

Each journal had grown denser in the final weeks. Not longer necessarily — some had maintained consistent length throughout — but more layered. The early entries were the writing of people still oriented toward their home context, measuring new things against familiar standards. The later entries were different. The familiar standards had become one standard among several. The new context had earned its own...