Aria looked at the garden.
She thought about what careful had felt like. The permanent low-level tension of it. The weight of managing what she showed and what she kept back, who she was in which moment, the exhausting mathematics of maintaining a false identity in a house that kept trying to become hers.
She thought about the first morning she'd woken up here as herself and stood at this window with her coffee and thought....this is where I live now.
"When did you know," Aria said. "That something was different about me."
Lucy thought about it. "Week two," she said. "You fixed the boiler."
Aria looked at her.
