Lyra was already sitting on the chair when she arrived.
This was usual. Lyra had a relationship with punctuality that Aelara had always privately admired, not the anxious kind that arrived ten minutes early out of fear of being late, but the settled kind that simply appeared when it said it would. She was sitting with a glass of water and her coat still on, reading something on her phone, and she looked up when Aelara came through the door with the specific attentiveness that was one of the things Aelara had trusted about her from the beginning.
"You look like you've been thinking hard since two o'clock," Lyra said.
"Since about eleven," Aelara said, and sat down.
