“You look different,” Desi said, setting the tea down in front of me. “Good different. Like someone took the volume down on something that’s been too loud for a long time.” “That’s accurate,” I said. She looked at me for a moment longer than she usually did, her empathic reading clearly picking up something she didn’t have words for either, and then she smiled and went back to the kitchen. I sat with my tea and looked around the dining hall and understood, fully for the first time, what it meant that nothing was the same anymore. The estate was vivid in a way it had never been. Not visually. The light through the windows was the same morning light it had always been, the same stone walls, the same furniture that had been here since before I arrived. The vividness was underneath all of that, a quality of presence I had been straining to access for five weeks and now simply had, the way you simply had hearing once you stopped covering your ears. I could feel the kitchen staff’s m
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