The days settled into a routine that looked, from the outside, like recovery.
Amara slept and woke and fed the boy and held the girl and sat in the garden when the afternoon light came through at the right angle, and Julian brought her tea she hadn't asked for, and the nurses managed the night shifts with quiet efficiency.
The house breathed again. The staff moved with the careful cheerfulness of people who understood that a household was healing and that healing required atmosphere as much as medicine.
From the outside. Amara was not outside. She was inside it, living it, and she noticed things.
She noticed it first in small ways. The way Julian's phone was always face down when she came into a room. The way conversations ended when she appeared not guiltily, not dramatically, but with the specific natural pause of someone switching registers.
