She finished it on a Sunday.
Adrian knew because the primary bond shifted in the late afternoon with the specific quality he had come to recognize — the particular, internal warmth of Seraphine being present in something until it reached its completion, followed by the quiet exhale of a person who has made something and is sitting with the fact of having made it before anyone else enters the space.
He was in the lower resonance chamber reviewing the northern schematic segment that Elara had extracted from the full city document. The work was genuine and absorbing — the northern corridor's channel geometry was more complex than the western segment had been, and the specific challenges it presented were the interesting kind, the kind that required real attention rather than the application of already-developed solutions.
And through the primary bond, in the late afternoon light of a Sunday, Seraphine finished the painting.
