In the Town, Few Minutes Later,
"Rika, I'm home."
The door of the apartment swung open with the practiced ease of someone who had opened it ten thousand times — not kicking it, not pushing it with excessive force, just the flat, forward press of a person arriving at a place that was theirs.
Esvan stepped inside.
The apartment was a narrow, warm thing on the main street — two rooms above a grain merchant's storefront, the kind of space that accumulated personality through sheer occupancy rather than decoration. A cracked pot on the sill. A worn rug near the door. The smell of yesterday's bread and the particular domestic order of a woman who kept things clean because chaos made her anxious.
Esvan was small.
