Months passed, gently, in the particular way that healing actually happens once the worst of a crisis has finally receded — not in one dramatic turn, but in a hundred small, ordinary days accumulating quietly into something that finally resembled an actual life rather than a series of emergencies survived.

Lucien's memory, they discovered slowly and with cautious, disbelieving relief, had genuinely stabilized. The occasional small loss still occurred — a detail here, a specific date there — but the catastrophic gaps had stopped entirely, the shared anchor Ezra had built at such cost to himself holding steady through weeks and then months of ordinary life together, tested against every...