Saori was up before the house.
She didn't know what had woken her — not a sound, not a dream she could name. Just the quiet arrival of consciousness at a quarter past five, and the immediate, specific awareness of exactly what her mind intended to do with the stillness.
She made tea without turning on the overhead light, working by the pale pre-dawn grey coming through the kitchen window, and took it to the chair by the living room window — the one that faced east, the one she had claimed without discussion some months ago because nobody else seemed to want the morning light and she had always preferred beginnings.
She sat. She drank her tea. She watched the dark outside the window make its slow, inevitable negotiation with the day.
She had been thinking about the same thing for eleven days.
