in her own days.
The first evening, she warmed soup on the small stove and fed her son in the rocking chair Mrs. Parker had sourced through a friend, a solid old chair with a slight creak on the forward rock that she found she liked. The sound of it made the apartment feel inhabited. Settled. The way spaces feel when something real is happening inside them.
Her suitcase sat by the bedroom door, the cracked handle facing out. She had not unpacked it fully yet. She wasn’t sure why. But looking at it that first night, she thought it looked less like damage than it used to. It looked like the thing that had gotten her here.
The compliance review concluded several weeks later. Claire was not told every consequence in detail, and she did not need to be. She knew enough. Improper transfers had been confirmed, routed through
