The villa door was unlocked.
Vane had not locked it when they left for deployment six days ago. The Academy's hill was the safest address on the island for most of the year and he'd stopped locking it the way people stopped locking things when nothing had ever come through the door.
He pushed it open now and the kitchen was empty.
The lamp was still burning from whenever Mara had last adjusted it, the flame at the reading height she used in the evenings. Burning into a room that nobody was sitting in.
Vane's chest tightened.
The tea was cold on the counter. He touched the cup. Longer than an hour. The ceramic cool under his fingers, no residual warmth at all.
The household ledger was open on the counter beside it. Not the accounts one—the other one, the one she'd started in July and never explained. It was open to a recent page and there was writing on it in her clean deliberate hand.
The writing stopped mid-sentence.
