Selena took Wednesday off.
This was not something she did often. She was constitutionally unsuited to doing nothing. Her brain ran continuously and had never developed a reliable standby mode.
But she was tired. Not the operational kind. The deeper kind that came from weeks of sustained high-alert management, the kind that sleep alone couldn't fix.
She sat in the garden of her flat with a book she did not read and a coffee that went cold and let the morning happen around her. The garden was small and walled and had a fig tree she had planted three years ago which had, this summer, finally decided to produce figs. She ate two. They were warm from the sun and very good.
She thought about Carmila.
