The tenth day arrived with a quality of ordinary.
This was not what I had expected. I had spent the previous nine days in the particular suspended state of active waiting — the operational alertness that kept the mind tuned to everything that might be significant. I had expected the tenth day to arrive with accumulated tension, the way a held breath eventually becomes its own pressure.
Instead, I woke in the early morning to the sound of rain — the first real rain of approaching spring, gentle and persistent, the kind that softened everything it touched without being dramatic about it — and found that the tension had resolved overnight into something that felt almost like clarity.
We had done everything we could do.
