The estate had gone quiet in that particular way it sometimes did after something significant had passed through it.
Not peaceful quiet. Not the lazy stillness of an uneventful afternoon. This was the quiet of a place holding its breath, the kind that pressed down on the walls and settled into the floors and made even footsteps feel like they were interrupting something. Like the estate itself understood that things were changing, and hadn't quite decided how it felt about that yet.
Fenix found Abigail in the east room.
She was curled up in the wide window seat with a book balanced on her knees, her raven hair loose around her shoulders and her crimson eyes moving across the page with that focused, slightly-furrowed expression she got when she was genuinely absorbed. She didn't look up when he appeared in the doorway. She just turned a page.
"You've been standing there for thirty seconds," she said.
He blinked. "How do you even know that?"
