The tea had gone cold.
Nobody moved to reheat it because the conversation had reached the kind of temperature that made the temperature of the tea irrelevant, the specific warmth of three women in a room who had said true things to each other and were now sitting in the aftermath of the saying, which was its own kind of warmth and did not require a kettle.
The silence after the wager had been a particular silence.
Not uncomfortable. Not the silence of people who did not know what to say but the silence of people who had received something large and were sitting with the receiving of it, letting it settle into the places it needed to settle before anyone tried to speak around it. Elara had watched them both in that silence — Selene with her cup and her bright careful eyes, Gabriella with her hand still over Elara's on the arm of the chair — and had felt the specific thing she felt when people she trusted received something true from her and did not drop it.
