He stood.
No ceremony in it — just rising from the stone in one motion, the robe settling around him as though it had been waiting for his body to return to vertical, which it had.
He looked at them one more time.
Both women in the pool now, having slid from the stone ledge in stages while he had been reading the system window — the mother floating on her back with her arms out and her amber eyes at the ceiling, the daughter draped half over her mother's torso with her face in the crook of the older woman's neck, dark hair spreading across the water like ink in a bowl.
Both of them breathing.
Both of them completely, thoroughly finished.
The pool around them carried everything the morning had produced — thin pink, faint white, dissolving in the water the way evidence dissolves when there is enough of it and enough water around it.
He adjusted his collar.
Ran one hand through his hair.
