She painted for three hours.
Adrian knew because the primary bond carried her presence with unusual clarity throughout the afternoon — not the focused, managed presence of Seraphine conducting estate business or navigating political strategy or reviewing the documentation that arrived daily from the Council's partnership framework, but something entirely different. The specific quality of someone who had become unreachable in the way she had described. Present in the thing they were doing to the exclusion of everything that wasn't the thing.
He felt it the way you felt a familiar sound going quiet — not as absence, as a different kind of presence. The primary anchor's warmth unchanged but its texture different. Deeper. More internal. The bond carrying something that had no operational vocabulary, only the direct, unmediated quality of a person who was simply, entirely, somewhere.
He didn't go to the painting room.
