The kitchen was empty except for the two of them, which almost never happened — Mara at the counter working through the evening ledger, Isole at the table with an archive folder she wasn't actually reading, the two of them existing in the same quiet without either one asking the other to fill it.
Vane was upstairs, deliberately, having caught the specific quality of the silence between the two of them when he'd come down for water and decided, correctly, that this was not a conversation that needed a third person in the room, even one who loved them both. He'd gone back up without either of them noticing he'd been there at all.
Mara finished a column, set her pen down at the natural stopping point rather than mid-thought, and turned around.
"You've read the same page for eleven minutes," she said.
Isole looked up. "You've been counting."
