The days after had a texture.
He had known they would. He had read about grief the way he read about everything that frightened him, thoroughly, in advance, and the reading had told him that grief was not a single event but a condition, a weather system, something you moved through rather than past.
The reading had been accurate.
What it hadn't captured was the specific quality of grief when you had been expecting it. When you had been making peace with it for two years alongside the person you were grieving. When the end arrived quietly, with dignity, in a waiting room full of people who showed up at two in the morning.
It was still enormous.
It was just … accompanied.
The practical things continued.
The funeral arrangements. The death certificate. The specific administrative sequence that followed a life ending, which Seren managed with the systematic focus he brought to everything that required system and focus.
Adrian helped.
