They ran three more sessions over the following four nights, the numbers climbing unevenly — thirty-nine, forty-one, a discouraging twenty-eight on a night Isole blamed on insufficient sleep and refused to discuss further. On the fifth night, after Vane had written down a new high of forty-nine, she didn't reach for the water. She sat across from him in the lamp's small circle of gold, and something in the quiet between them had changed shape without either of them announcing it.
He noticed it first in her hands — how they'd gone still on the table instead of reaching for the next blank sheet, how her thumb traced the same worn groove in the wood over and over without seeming to know it was doing it.
"Isole."
"I'm thinking," she said, "about how badly I want to say something, and how little practice I have saying it."
