Marketplace

Three of us rose to leave a table where we'd been sitting a long while: Zeivaen, who carries things quietly until they come out all at once; Dadyl, who notices what's underneath a conversation before anyone names it; and Sylvie, who has a way of saying the hard thing first so no one else has to. We'd been circling something between us for weeks - an old strain, a trust that had thinned out from distance and from things left unsaid. As we stood, the question hung in the air unasked: whether what had broken could be rebuilt from the outside in, through gestures and routine, or whether the deeper thing had to mend first, quietly, before any of that would hold.