The office came with hours. That had been the whole kindness of it, the thing every mother in the assembly had heard and wept over — the girl gets hours now, a boundary, a place to say no. Wren had hours. They were written down. From the second bell to the sixth she belonged to the city, and the rest of the day was hers, and that was the shape of the protection they'd built her out of love.
It lasted about a month, the shape.
...