His sleep had been running at the wrong time since the ninth. Not terribly wrong. Half an hour, maybe forty minutes, drifting later each day. He had read that other animals were doing the same thing. The body had been timing itself by the moon for a long time and had not yet adjusted to timing itself by something else.
The log went back eight years. He opened it to the last entry, which was dated nine days before the moon left. He had noted the phase: waxing gibbous, seventy-one percent illuminated. Cloud cover estimated at forty percent. Rise and set times. What he always noted. There was nothing in the entry that knew.
He had been thinking about this. How the entry did not know it was the last one. It sat in the sequence as though the sequence continued. He did not know how to mark an ending he had not seen coming. He was not sure it was his to mark. The log had not promised him continuity. He had simply assumed it.
Aven came through from the other room and asked if he had eaten yet. He said he had. She looked at the log open on the table and said nothing about it. He appreciated that. She had always understood which things he needed to sit with without explanation. It was one of the things about her he had never taken for granted.
After she left he found himself calculating how long until the next full phase. The habit was older than the log. He had been counting by phases since he was a child. The number assembled itself in his head before he remembered there was no next full phase. He sat for a while with the calculation that had nowhere to arrive.