The morning came the way mornings do after everything has shifted, quietly, without ceremony, as though the world had not agreed to rearrange itself overnight.

Lena woke before the alarm.

She lay still for a moment in the pale grey light, her eyes on the ceiling, her hands folded over her sternum the way she sometimes slept when she was trying to keep something in. She listened to the house. It was a thing she had learned to do in the weeks since she'd arrived, reading the silence of it, the particular and specific quality of quiet at different hours, the way the building breathed. This morning the silence felt...