POV: VIVIAN
Helena arrives the way she arrives at the moments that matter, which is without announcement and without the dramatic cold of her more theatrical appearances, just the specific shift in the quality of the air that signals her presence before she's visible, and she is simply there in the doorway of the kitchen with the Portuguese morning behind her and the two of us still holding each other in the specific posture of people who have reached the end of argument and found what's underneath it.
She looks at the room. She looks at us. She looks at the place where the floor trembled, which has settled back to stillness but still carries the quality of recent disturbance, the way a room carries recent sounds even after they've stopped.
Then she looks at something I can't see, the invisible layer that Helena looks at when she's reading a supernatural condition, and her expression does something I haven't seen on it before.
Uncertainty.
