He looks down. She looks up.

“No,” he says. “But I’m no longer broken.”

She watches the current. “The person I was before I learned that love is a load-bearing wall. And the person I am now, who knows that even walls need cracks to breathe.”

She turns. In the dark, she crosses the room. She kneels in front of his chair. She takes his hands—calloused, precise, gentle—and presses them to her own face.

Clara’s mornings are governed by coffee and spreadsheets. Lukas’s mornings are governed by the soft tick-tick-tick of a 18th-century Comtoise clock he is restoring. Their only interaction is acoustic: her heels on the parquet, his muffled radio playing Satie.

“Goodnight, Clara.”