Twenty-eight weeks felt like a different country from twenty-two.
The body had stopped offering commentary and started issuing directives. Sleep had its own schedule now, disconnected from his preferences. The walk from the elevator to his desk required a specific pace that was not the pace he had always walked at, and he had made peace with this after approximately three days of resisting it.
He was on modified hours.
This had been Dr. Yuen's recommendation and Caelan's immediate adoption and Seren's eventual acceptance, in that order, after a conversation in which Seren had explained that modified hours created gaps in coverage and Caelan had explained that he had already hired a part-time coordinator to cover those gaps and Damien had appeared in the doorway with the coordinator's first-day schedule already printed.
He had looked at both of them.
He had accepted the modified hours.
"You planned that," he said to Caelan afterward.
"Yes," Caelan said.
