The office felt wrong.
Not unfamiliar-- she had spent enough late nights here to recognize every angle of shadow, every muted reflection on glass-- but wrong in the way a place becomes when something inside it has shifted and refuses to settle back.
Galathea stayed on the sofa anyway.
The penthouse had been an option. It always was. Higher, quieter, curated into something almost insulated from consequence. But it was full of them-- of conversations that had meant something, of touches that hadn't been measured, of a version of herself that no longer felt stable enough to return to.
Here, the air was thinner. Less memory. Less weight.
Still too much.
She sat folded into herself, arms wrapped tight across her ribs as if she could hold something in place. Her skin hadn't stopped reacting since Vespera's gallery-- since the revelations, the pressure, the way everything had tilted just slightly out of alignment.
It wasn't pain.
It was worse.
