The second line came easier in the hallway.
I'd left the first one glowing faintly above the headboard, and Luna behind it, re-braiding her hair with the patience of someone who has never once been late in her life. Alice had asked for two. I stopped halfway down the hall, where the white wall runs clean between two framed photographs, and let my breath settle. No tent over the world. No garden. Just the margin where story lives because people choose it.
"Words carry weight only when they are carried kindly," I wrote, small and careful.
That one landed slower than the first. The hum thickened, then smoothed into place, and the hallway felt a fraction wider, as though it had stopped bracing for someone to run down it.
"Acceptable," said a voice from the kitchen doorway.
Alice leaned on the jamb in sleep-soft clothes, hair up, a mug in her hand. Somehow she makes "good morning" sound like a rubric and a hug at once.
"You're early," I said.
