Willow woke at five in the morning, long before the alarm she had set out of habit rather than necessity. The bedroom was still dark, expansive and quiet, the kind of silence that came from space rather than emptiness. For a moment she lay motionless, letting consciousness settle into her body without resistance. There was no jolt of panic and no rush of dread. What she felt instead was a precise awareness of sequence, the internal ordering of steps that would carry her forward whether she argued with them or not.
Shower. Coffee. Review. Decide.
The order mattered more than the outcome. The order always mattered. It was how she kept her footing when the ground threatened to tilt.
