The house was not silent, but rather filled with the sound of absence. It wasn’t until she began to collect the echoes that the meaning of exile settled upon her, heavy and sweet.

She spent her mornings cataloging the dust motes spinning in the shafts of light through the high eastern window. In the stillness, a deep structural cunning manifested. To write without permission, to think without an audience—this was the true antidote to the frantic machinery of the world left behind. Every sentence clawed its way out from the marrow, pure and uncorrupted.