April 1, 2026
No alarm.
Well. No gym alarm. The six-thirty alarm is a significantly more civilized proposition than five-thirty, and I receive it accordingly. Elara is already moving by the time I get my bearings, which is the standard state of affairs.
I get to the kitchen and find the KafoMaster has already assessed the situation and produced two coffees, which is either anticipation or the machine running through its established pattern. At this point I have stopped trying to determine which.
Elara is at the table with her granola and yogurt, looking at something on her phone with the focused attention of a pilot reviewing airspace data. I pull down the Chocopoofs.
She looks at the box, then at me.
"You're aware it's April," she says.
"I am," I say.
"The box has a snowman on it," she says.
"It's a limited edition holiday box," I say, slightly defensively. "From December. I've been rationing."
She looks at the box for another moment, then at her granola, then at me again with the expression that, I have come to understand, means she finds me genuinely baffling in a way she has decided she likes.
"Chocopoofs," Ash observes internally, with the tone he uses for things he has filed as data. "The holiday box. You were hiding it."
"I wasn't hiding it," I tell him. "I put it behind the oat bran."
"That's hiding it," Ash says.
"That's strategic storage," I say.
She heads out at seven-fifteen — flight center, morning brief, the life of someone who works at altitude and keeps its hours. We stand at the door for the usual amount of time and she goes. I finish the Chocopoofs. The KafoMaster refills my coffee without being asked.
"Day three of the home stretch," Ash says.
"Thursday, Friday, Saturday," I say. "Movers at nine Saturday morning."
"The kitchen table," he says.
"The kitchen table," I say.
The better kitchen table, arriving Saturday. We have made peace with this.
I get to the Center at eight.
I stop by Claire's office on the way to mine. She's already at her desk, which is how Claire exists — already there, already thinking, her sphinx settled on her shoulder in the attentive morning posture that it carries into every working day.
"How was the install?" she asks, without looking up from what she is reading.
"Impressive," I say. "The windows are exactly what they said. From inside, completely normal. I took a photo from the street on my phone — flat black."
She looks up at that. Her sphinx shifts to the interested posture.
"Ninety-seven percent," she says.
"That's what Cameron said. I'm satisfied with the facility audit findings and the remediation timeline. I wanted your read on the car question."
"The vehicle assessment is scheduled for today?" she asks?
"I know. I'm not sure I need it. The house is covered. The Center is being covered. A car system feels like it might be the layer too many."
She considers this with the measured quality she brings to risk questions. Her sphinx does the small adjustment it makes when it is working through something.
"The car is the moving element," she says. "Fixed structures are a solved problem. Mobile platforms—"
"Tell her about the smoke screens."
"I'm not telling her about the smoke screens," I say.
"The smoke screens are a legitimate tactical consideration.” He adopts what I have come to think of as his field operative posture — shoulders back, plumage compressing into something more aerodynamic, voice dropping a register. "In any mobile surveillance scenario, creating a visual disruption envelope—"
He turns a quick pirouette, creating a small whirlwind of smoke, which he uses to sneak around to my other shoulder.
“Ta-da!” He erupts with golden sparks.
Claire’s sphinx has been watching Ash's smoke screen escape with the expression of a monster that has seen many things and finds this particular thing more interesting than alarming. It tilts its head. Ash holds his field-operative posture. The sphinx tilts its head the other way. There is a long pause.
Then there is a laugh. The sphinx looks at Claire, looks at me, and settles back into its standard position with the composed dignity of an entity that has decided it has observed enough and that the single laugh conveyed all it needed to.
"What is he doing?" Claire asks.
"I used to watch a lot of spy and espionage movies, years and years ago. It was a phase.” I say.
"How bad is it?" she says.
"Smoke screens on the car bad"
Claire looks at where Ash is. The sphinx looks at where Ash is. Ash, who knows perfectly well that I have just disclosed the smoke screen, adjusts his posture to something more dignified.
"The car is your call," Claire says, returning to the actual question. "If your assessment is that the existing coverage is sufficient, I'd support that. The Center is the primary clinical exposure. The house is the residential exposure. The car is the space in between."
"That's what I was thinking," I say. "I'll talk to Digital Denial this morning."
She nods and goes back to her reading. The sphinx does the brief look-back it does when a conversation has concluded something worth noting. On the way out, Ash is still working through his position on mobile surveillance vectors.
"The smoke screens," he says.
"Another time," I say.
"That's not a no," he says.
"It's not a yes," I say.
He files this as a developing situation.
I call Digital Denial at nine-fifteen and reach Cameron directly.
"The vehicle assessment today," I say. "I've been thinking it through and I don't think I need it. The house is covered, the Center is being covered. My exposure in transit is a different category of risk and I'm not sure the mobile platform system is the right response to it."
A brief pause on her end.
"That's actually a reasonable assessment," Cameron says. "Honestly, the full vehicle suite is most appropriate for high-level government and military — people whose movements are specifically targeted and whose vehicles are themselves surveillance subjects. For your situation, the fixed infrastructure should be sufficient."
"I appreciate you saying that," I say.
"We're not in the business of selling people things they don't need," she says.
Ash, who has been listening with the focused attention of a being who has a significant interest in the outcome, absorbs this in silence.
Then:
"Ask about the navigation and stereo," he says, internally.
I look at him.
"Ask about the navigation and stereo," he says again, with the reasonable energy of someone who has identified a completely separate track of inquiry.
I put my hand over the phone.
"That's not what this call is about," I say.
"It's a separate product question," he says. "If they do vehicle systems, they probably do vehicle upgrades. The navigation in your car is six years old. The stereo has a CD player. A CD player, Willie."
He is not wrong about the CD player.
"Cameron," I say. "One more question. Completely unrelated. Do you do vehicle electronics upgrades? Navigation, audio systems?"
A pause. Then, with the very slight shift in tone of someone who has made an unexpected left turn:
"...We don't, no. That's not our product line. There are good shops in the area, though. I can send you some names."
"Please don't," I say.
"Understood," she says.
We wrap up. The vehicle assessment is canceled. Cameron confirms the Center audit remediation timeline and the billing for the house install. We say goodbye.
Ash is quiet for a moment.
"The navigation," he says.
"There are shops for that," I say.
"There are shops for that," he says, with more attitude than I think was deserved.
James Ward comes in at eleven.
He has the quality I've been watching develop over the last several sessions — the quality of someone who has been doing something difficult and has found, in doing it, that the doing is different from what he expected. Not easier. Clearer.
His golem is in a posture I haven't seen it use before: not the tighter and tenser configuration it had in the early sessions, not the tentative state of someone balancing between hope and regret. Today it has a quality of settled engagement — present in the room in the way that something is present when it is no longer managing how much of itself to show.
"How's the week?" I ask.
"I've been talking to Sarah," he says. "Really talking. Not the kind where I'm managing what I say. The kind where I say the thing and see what happens."
"How is that going?" I ask.
"Better than I thought," he says. "She's angry at me. She has a right to be angry at me. But the anger is — it's clean, somehow. It doesn't feel like the end of something. It feels like a real thing between two people who are going to figure it out."
He pauses.
"I talked to her about Danny," he says.
I wait.
"Not the way I've been talking about him," he says. "The way I'd been doing it was like filing a report. Here are the facts, here is what happened, here is what I know I did wrong. This was different. I told her about the Tuesday nights. When he was in high school."
He looks at his hands.
"Every Tuesday night we watched whatever game was on, whether or not either of us cared about the teams. Didn't matter. We'd sit there and yell at the TV and he'd make this terrible popcorn — burned, always burned — and he thought it was a joke but I actually liked it. The burned popcorn. I never told him."
His golem makes a slow movement.
"I never told him," he says again. "That I liked the burned popcorn."
The room holds this. The specific texture of a small unspoken thing that becomes enormous in its absence.
"You're telling me," I say.
He looks up.
"Yeah," he says. "I guess I am."
We sit with it. There's no reframing needed, no clinical move to make. He has arrived at the place where the work is — not the structural guilt, not the question of complicity, but the actual grief. The man who liked the burned popcorn and never got to say so.
"Did Sarah know about the Tuesday nights?" I ask, after a while.
"She remembered them," he says. "She said she used to hear us through the ceiling. That it was her favorite sound in the house."
He stops. His golem stills.
"Her favorite sound," he says.
I write in my notes afterward that James Ward has found his way into the actual loss. The structural work — the guilt, the complicity, the question of what he knew and when he knew it — has not been abandoned. It has been earned past. He is now in the territory where the grief lives, and the grief is the real work, and he is doing it.
Valerie comes in at two.
The phoenix is different from the last session. The gray that came back after the dream — the three seconds of disorientation, the ash returning over the black and ivory — has receded again. Not all the way. The gray is always going to be part of the palette; that's the nature of this particular loss. But the black and ivory have reasserted themselves in the way they have been doing, slowly, over seven months.
She looks, in the honest and unromanticized sense, like someone who had a hard week and came through it.
"How's Daniel?" I ask.
She considers the question. This is different from before — the earlier sessions, the question about Daniel produced the specific tension of someone being asked about something they aren't sure they're allowed to have. Today it produces something closer to consideration.
"Good," she says. "He's patient. He doesn't push. He gives me room for the complicated parts and he's still there when I come back from them."
"That sounds like someone who understands what he signed up for," I say.
"He served with Marcus," she says. "He knows what it cost. He's not competing with the memory. He knows it's not a competition."
Her phoenix is in the working posture — the black and ivory at their forward edge, the ash behind them rather than over them. The bird is not in its full fire. But it is facing the direction of fire rather than ash.
"I went to the range last week," she says. "For the first time since it happened. Marcus used to take me."
"How was it?" I ask.
"Hard," she says. "And good. Both at the same time. Daniel was there. He didn't say anything about it being the first time. He just shot with me."
The phoenix makes a small movement — a settling. Not the collapse of the March session, the settling of something finding its ground.
"I didn't forget Marcus," she says. "That's what I was afraid of. That moving forward meant forgetting. But I was thinking about him the whole time. I was just also doing something."
"That's what moving forward is," I say. "Not leaving. Carrying."
She nods slowly.
After she goes I sit for a minute. The phoenix had the black and ivory at their widest this session since the work began. Still ash in the palette. But the phoenix is finding its fire. These things take as long as they take and not one day less, and sometimes you get to sit in the room when something turns a corner, and today was one of those days.
The April evening is doing something the March evenings weren't doing. It is warm. Not just not-cold — actually warm, the kind where being outside is a choice you're glad you made rather than one you're enduring. I notice it the moment I step out of the Center.
Ash notices it too.
"Kabobs," he says, internally.
"Yes," I say.
"The grill," he says.
"Yes," I say.
"We haven't used the grill," he says, "in a long time. A very long time in fact. Since before the dark days."
"I know, I remember," feeling slightly guilty.
"The weather is right for it now," he says.
I stop at the market on the way home. Top sirloin, the big one, Ash insists. Bell peppers — red, yellow, one orange — and red onion. Zucchini because there is always zucchini for kabobs and it is always the right call. A lemon for the marinade. The specific marinade I have been making for years that involves olive oil and garlic and oregano and a little smoked paprika and enough time.
I get home, make the marinade, cut everything, skewer, and set it in the refrigerator to absorb for an hour while I read through the session notes and catch up on the week's administrative debt. The cold root beer bottle leaving a ring on the kitchen table.
“That will be the last ring this table ever sees. Three days and out the door. Try not to get too teary eyed.”
Elara comes through the door at six-thirty.
"I'm grilling," I say.
She puts her bag down and greets me with a huge hug and an enthusiastic kiss
"You really know how to sweet-talk me.”
I get the charcoal going. Elara brings out two fresh root beers and sits at the table outside, watching me work.
The smell of spring is specific tonight. Not the tentative early March quality of something thinking about becoming itself, but the committed smell of something that has decided. The trees in the row down the block have started blossoming white and pink. There is something green happening on the Chens' side of the street that was definitely not there last week.
The skewers go on when the coals are ready. The sound of it — the first sizzle, the smoke rising from the grate — is the sound of a season changing.
Elara has her feet up on the porch railing, which is a thing she does when she is thoroughly comfortable. Shoneah, silver and viridian, is in the easy posture of a golem at rest in the right place at the right time. Ash has the warm gold of a phoenix who is experiencing the smell of grilling steak from proximity and finds it completely satisfactory.
The front door of the Chen house opens.
Mrs. Chen steps out onto her porch in the deliberate way of a woman who has been waiting for an appropriate moment and has decided this one meets the standard. She surveys the street. She surveys our porch. She surveys the grill.
"I like your windows!" she calls across.
I look at Elara.
"News travels," Elara says.
"Thank you!" I call back.
"Very nice," she says. "Very clean. My husband said you had work done."
Below her, Mr. Chen is in the flower bed along the porch, working on what appears to be the first planting of the season. He raises a hand in greeting without looking up from the bed, which is the Mr. Chen acknowledgment, warm and complete in its own way.
I notice their porch. The boards are new — or rather, the section that was damaged in the January ice storm has been replaced. The old boards had cracked along the left side and listed toward the steps, a project Mr. Chen had mentioned was on the list for spring. The list has been addressed. The porch is level and even and looks like it has been there for years.
"Your porch looks great!" I call.
"Finally got to it!" he calls back, still not looking up from the flower bed, but with the satisfaction in his voice of someone whose list is shorter than it was.
Mrs. Chen remains on her porch for the duration of the grilling. This is her right and we do not begrudge it. She is not intrusive — she is simply present, in the way of someone who enjoys good weather and the smell of a neighbor's grill and sees no reason to pretend otherwise.
We eat on the porch. The kabobs are what kabobs are when everything has been done right — the steak at the edge of char, the peppers soft and sweet, the red onion doing the thing it does on high heat which is become something better than it started as, the zucchini exactly the right amount of done. The lemon-garlic marinade is the thread that connects all of it.
"The smoked paprika."
"Yes," I say.
"It's doing significant work,"
"It always does,"
We eat in the mostly-comfortable quiet of people who have had good days and are sitting in the early evening of a turning season and are not in a hurry to be anywhere else. The street is doing its evening things. A dog is being walked by someone whose patience is being tested. The maple three houses down has gone past the preliminary bud stage into something that is almost leaf.
Mrs. Chen goes inside when the light starts to go. She does not say anything further. She has made her statement about the windows and is satisfied. The flower bed is finished. The Chens' porch holds the evening.
“That is a pretty significant amount of work for someone his age.” Elara notes
“I have a hard time reading them sometimes. Both their monsters are vibrant, they are very active in the community. They could be anywhere from fifty to one hundred years old. I honestly don’t know.”
Elara chuckles “Don’t you dare ask her.”
“Never crossed my mind.”
We sit until the charcoal is down to its orange embers and the plates are clean and the several rounds of root beer are empty. The street is quiet in the way that April streets get quiet when the warmth has been in the air all day and everyone has absorbed it and is content.
"Thursday," Elara says.
"Friday," I say.
"Saturday," she says.
"Movers at nine," I say.
She nods. The home stretch.
We bring the dishes in. The grill gets covered and moved back to its spot. Ash is in the warm settled amber of the best kind of evening — the kind that ends with a full stomach and a good spring smell in the air.
"Good day," he says.
"Good day," I say.
“Back and Biceps in the morning.”
I didn’t need the reminder, but I did check my alarms.
Bed by ten. The week's last few heavy days ahead. I fell asleep thinking about burned popcorn and Tuesday nights and the phoenix finding its fire. About Mrs. Chen on her porch, staying for the whole grill. About the home stretch.
________________________________________________________________________________
Civil War Fact of the Day: On April 1, 1865, the Battle of Five Forks was fought and won by Sheridan's cavalry and Warren's infantry, cutting the last supply line to Lee's army at Petersburg. It was the blow that made everything else inevitable. The Confederate position, which had been described as desperate for months, had now become impossible. What is notable about Five Forks is not that it was a surprise — the outcome had been visible to clear-eyed observers for some time — but that even after the position became impossible, the men in it did not simply dissolve. They fought. They retreated in order. They regrouped south of Petersburg. Some of them made it to Appomattox. Something in humans resists the acknowledgment that a situation is over even when the situation is over, and sometimes that resistance is stubbornness and sometimes it is courage and sometimes it is both, and sometimes the difference only becomes clear in retrospect. What is not complicated: Pickett was absent, Five Forks fell, and the war had eight days left.