The villa settled back into its ordinary rhythm within a week, the way it always did — not because anything had stopped mattering, but because a house full of people who loved each other had learned, out of necessity, how to carry enormous things without letting them crush the small ones.
Mara's ledger filled with ordinary entries again. The bird came back to the garden wall every morning without fail. Isole still checked her wristband out of habit some mornings, though less than she used to, and nobody in the house had heard anything further from Silver Wood since the panel's decision — not silence as relief, exactly, but silence as the specific kind of quiet that came before something rather than after it.
Vane didn't let himself forget that. He simply let it sit where it needed to sit, filed rather than carried.
Six weeks remained before graduation.
