The morning sun stretched its golden fingers across the windowpane, casting a lattice of warm, fractured light upon the floorboards. Outside, the world was humming a lullaby only the dawn could compose—gentle birdsong stitched through the air like silver thread, rustling leaves performed a slow ballet in the breeze, and the sky, painted in mellow shades of apricot and rose, watched over it all with a quiet kind of grace. It was, by every measure, a morning dipped in perfection. The kind poets would have written odes about. The kind lovers would frame in memory. The kind that made the soul stretch and sigh.

But not here. Not in this room.