The household settled into a new configuration without announcing itself.
This was how change worked, in my experience — not in the dramatic declarations that stories preferred, but in the accumulation of small adjustments, each one unremarkable on its own, that together constituted something substantially different from what had been before. You did not notice the change while it was happening. You noticed, one morning, that the configuration was simply different, and that it had probably been different for some time.
I noticed it on a Tuesday, in the third week after the investigation concluded, in the fifth week after what had happened in the study on a Thursday afternoon.
