The morning after was a Saturday.
This was not significant operationally. Days of the week had not been significant operationally for months, the way they stopped being significant when the work was the kind that didn't observe the distinction between days that were for working and days that were for something else. But it felt significant in the way certain small facts felt significant when the frame around them had changed, when the same information meant something different because the context that gave it meaning had shifted.
Saturday.
No next thing.
Aiden woke to that specific quality of morning, the one that existed when the operational pressure that had been organizing his waking hours for months was no longer there, when the first minutes of consciousness reached for the day's structure and found something different: not absence, but openness, the particular quality of time that was not yet shaped.
He lay still for a moment.
He listened to the apartment.
