When it stopped, the silence it left behind was enormous and, at first, almost disorienting, before it resolved into what it actually was, which was peace.

I had not known the word applied to me until I had it.

Peace had always sounded, in Julian’s world, like a soft thing, a lesser thing, the consolation prize of people who had not won.

I understand now that it is the opposite — that peace is what is left when you stop spending your whole self defending a surface, and that there is nothing soft about the work of getting there.

Lily flourished.