Forty minutes was not enough time to become a different person.
Aelara had never needed it to be. She had spent years walking into rooms where people were waiting to pick apart everything she said, every pause, every small shift in her expression. She knew how to do this. She had a very specific way of carrying herself when it mattered, a particular stillness that started somewhere deep in her chest and spread outward until it reached her hands, her face, the way she moved through a doorway. She reached for it now the way she reached for familiar things in the dark.
It was there. It was always there.
What was different this morning was the thing living underneath it.
