I found the drawing book two days later.
Not because I was looking for it. Alaric had left it on the kitchen table when he went out to his morning session with Aldric, and I came in to refill my coffee, and there it was, open, the pages spread the way a book spreads when it's recently been used, and the spine was still warm from a hand.
I didn't mean to look. I looked anyway.
The page it was open to was not the view from the wall, which I'd seen him working on two nights ago. This was something different. Something I hadn't seen him work on, which meant he'd done it this morning before the session, or last night after I'd gone to bed, in whatever hours he occupies when the rest of the house is quiet, and his particular way of seeing the world doesn't have to accommodate anyone else's.
