Sinful Affairs
A slow, deep contraction, like a second heartbeat deciding to make itself known.
I pressed two fingers there, the old instinct. The gift had never spoken in words, not in eleven years of keeping it. It spoke in pressure, in warmth, in the occasional stubbornness of knowing before I did. Tonight it was certain about something I hadn’t caught up to yet.
I turned back to my desk. The census of ward failures along the southern Ashfields was spread across the whole surface, annotated in three colors, waiting for me to find the pattern I suspected was there. My tea had gone cold. The candle was burning low on the left side, which meant I’d been tilting toward the window more than I’d realized.