He felt the weakness before he opened his eyes.
It was in everything — the specific, total heaviness of a body that had decided it was done cooperating, the particular quality of exhaustion that went beyond tired into something structural. The light was wrong. Too bright, too high, the specific angle of afternoon sun rather than morning, pressing through his eyelids with the unhurried persistence of something that had been there for hours.
He opened his eyes.
The blur came first. Then, slowly, it resolved — the ceiling, the window, the light — and then Rebecca, standing above him, her face carrying the specific expression of someone who had been watching a situation develop and had been waiting for him to catch up to it.
He tried to speak. His throat felt like something had been wrung out of it.
"Becca."
