She made the decision before dawn.

Not at a specific moment — she could not have pointed to the second at which the decision formed, because it was more like a tide than a moment, something that had been moving in one direction for long enough that when she woke at four-thirty and lay in the darkness she simply knew it had arrived. The decision was there, complete, with the specific quality of things that had been made below the level of conscious deliberation and had surfaced, finished.

She was going to go home.

Not permanently. Not as a repudiation of what she had found here, of the work or the case or the thing that had been building between her and Cassian that she still did not know what to do with. She was going to go home because she needed to be somewhere that was entirely hers — not borrowed, not weighted with other people's histories, not a space in which every room contained evidence of things she was still processing — and she needed to be there for long enough to actually process them.

The nursery. Her mother. The smell of orange blossom and earth that was specifically her earth, her inheritance, her ordinary life that had been waiting in Mirrowen while she had been in this extraordinary one.

She packed efficiently, which was how she did everything. Not everything — she was not leaving for good, and packing for good would have felt like a lie. She packed for a week, the clothes and tools and notebooks that a week required, and she left the rest in the room that had become hers over six weeks in a way that rooms rarely became yours in a short time but sometimes did.

At seven o'clock she went to Cassian's study.

He was at his desk. Of course he was. He had been at his desk when she had needed to find him at every significant moment in a month, and she had stopped finding this strange some time ago and had started finding it reliable. He was a person who showed up at his desk and did the work, which was not a small thing in a person.

He looked up when she came in.

She placed the compiled copy of the full evidence package on his desk. Not the original — the originals were already submitted. This was the working copy, her set, organized in the order she had been maintaining it. "Everything is here," she said. "In the order the committee will receive it. If there are follow-up questions from the submission — and there will be — you have what you need to answer them."

He looked at the package. He looked at her. She had the bag over her shoulder and he understood immediately, she could see him understand, and he did the thing she had been afraid he might not do: he did not ask her not to go.

"You're leaving," he said.

"For a few days. I need to see my mother. I need to be in Mirrowen for a little while." She paused. "And I need to think."

"All right," he said.

Two words. The two words that meant he understood and was not going to argue with what she needed, which was the two words she had needed most to hear.

"The activation," she said. "I want to be there for it. I meant that."

"When?"

"Three days. Give me three days." She thought about the nursery, the soil, the orange blossom tree. She thought about her mother's face when she came through the door. She thought about the specific grounding of being in a place that was entirely yours, with no complicated histories and no glass rooms and no evidence packages. "Three days is enough."

"I'll hold the activation," he said. "Until you're here."

She nodded.

She looked at him across the study — the desk and the papers and the lamp that was still burning even though the morning was fully light, because he had been working since before dawn, because he was a person who showed up. She looked at him and she thought about everything she knew about him, which was more than she had known about anyone in a long time, and she thought about everything she was still figuring out, which was also considerable.

"I'm not leaving because I've decided something," she said. "I'm leaving because I need to think and I can't think here. This house is — it's too much of itself. It requires too much of me to be in it."

"I know," he said. "It requires that of everyone who stays here long enough."

She thought: *yes. That's true. And you've been here your whole life.*

She did not say this. She said: "I'll see you in three days."

Rowan was waiting in the entrance hall with his coat on and his travel bag at his feet. He had his practical face — the face of someone who had received all the relevant information and had organized their response around it.

"I thought you were staying for the activation," she said.

"I am. I'll come back with you." He looked at her with the amber eyes that had known her long enough to require very little performance. "You shouldn't be on a train alone with all of that in your head."

She looked at him for a moment.

"All right," she said.

Lady Maribel was at the top of the staircase. She had dressed, which in Maribel's case was an act of decision as much as necessity — the black dress, the precise posture, the face that had been practicing composure for thirty years. She looked at Seraphine from the top of the stairs with the expression she had worn at their first meeting, which had seemed like judgment then and which Seraphine now understood was something closer to attention.

"Three days," Seraphine said, looking up at her.

"Yes," Maribel said. And then, in the tone of a woman who had spent three years not saying things that needed to be said and had recently undertaken to change that habit: "Your father would have been glad to know you."

Seraphine received this. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and received it properly, which took a moment.

"Thank you," she said.

She went out.

The carriage was at the drive. The morning was grey and cold and the sea was making its argument with the cliffs as it always did, permanent and loud. She put her bag in the carriage and got in and Rowan got in beside her and the driver clicked to the horse and Luminara Hall began to move away.

She did not look back immediately. She looked forward, at the road that ran along the coast toward the south, toward Mirrowen, toward the nursery where her mother was probably already in the greenhouse checking on the spring bulbs she would have started in October, toward the orange blossom tree that had been there longer than she could remember and would still be there when she came back.

When she came back.

She looked back once, when the road curved and the house was about to disappear behind the headland. The grey stone. The glass panels of the conservatory. The window of Cassian's study, lit, because he was there and he was working and he would be working when she came back and that was a form of faithfulness she was not yet sure what to do with but was not dismissing.

The house went behind the headland.

She faced forward.

Rowan, beside her, was reading the engineering report he had prepared for the submission, which was how Rowan processed events — by returning to the technical work that was his most comfortable form of presence in the world. She appreciated this about him. She always had.

She opened her notebook to the two-column page and looked at the right side, which she had written last night in the careful accounting of where she was. She read it once. Then she closed the notebook.

She knew where she was. She knew what she needed. She knew she was coming back.

The rest was figuring out what she was coming back to, and what she was bringing with her, and whether the two of those things could be the same thing.

Three days. She had three days to find out.