The afternoon settled into something that felt, almost miraculously, like normality.
The drawing room and adjoining dining room were filled with people and conversation.
Food appeared in steady rotation from the kitchen—Diana's cooking, as reliable as gravity and far more comforting.
Jaegar sat in one of the drawing room chairs and felt, for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, something approaching ease.
The recovery had been necessary, and the healing chamber of Autumnhold had been extraordinary, but it had also been quiet and still and contained in a way that had occasionally felt more like an extension of the coma than an actual return to living.
This—the noise and warmth and overlapping conversations, Arthur Jr.'s laugh from across the room, Pierre's measured voice asking someone a thoughtful question, the smell of Diana's cooking drifting from the kitchen—this was being alive in a way that mattered.
