In the morning, the penthouse felt different.
Alora caught it before she was fully awake, still lying in the grey early light, with the city forty-three floors below and the quiet of the apartment doing what silence here always did, which was expand to fill every available surface.
She grew up in a place where silence signified something was amiss. In some cases it just meant: this is a place that costs more per square foot than your mother's entire treatment plan.
She had learned to sleep through it.
This morning, she couldn't.
She stayed still for exactly four minutes, she knew because she watched the digital readout on the bedside clock, which she had not asked for and which he butted there without comment when they first moved in together during the first cold week of November and thought about the argument. Not the content of it.
