He thought about yesterday morning. He thought about the specific quality of her in the morning hours, the way she moved through the room still half-asleep, still reaching in the unconscious, habitual way of a body that had not yet caught up to the waking mind's knowledge of absence for a weight that was not there.
A small weight. The weight of a child barely a month old who should have never been in her arms, who she would have carried to the window to show her the morning light over Verenza, who she had been denied by a man sitting two floors below them, smiling.
Amara had gotten up anyway.
She had dressed. She had come here. She had stood beside Julian through the ceremony and through the signing and through the cameras and through the moment when the story they had built, the careful, true story of what had been done to them, was turned inside out and handed back to the world as evidence of their guilt.
She had held it together.
Every moment of it.
Julian crossed the room.
