The house settled into a different kind of quiet after Sela went to sleep.
Not the silence of an empty place, but the kind that came when someone had closed a door with the intention of resting, the specific quality of stillness that followed when a person who had been carrying a great deal decided, for a few hours at least, to put it down. The lights in the main room stayed low. The vents hummed steadily. The city outside was present but distant, its noise filtered by the walls and the late hour into something that felt almost like weather rather than a place, a texture rather than a fact.
Kael sat at the table.
