On the third evening, it rained.
Not heavily — not the kind of rain that demands shelter and rearranges plans. The kind that arrives quietly in the late afternoon and settles in, fine and persistent, turning the sea a deeper gray and making the stone path down to the shore glisten in the last of the light. The kind of rain that changes a place without disrupting it.
We had returned from the headland path by early afternoon and spent the middle part of the day separately, which was its own kind of deliberate thing — not distance, but the recognition that two people who have spent a year in close professional proximity need, occasionally, the practice of occupying different rooms. I spent two hours at the small desk in my room writing correspondence I had deferred during the operation. Kaien, I assumed, did something similar. We had not discussed it. The need for it was mutually understood.
