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“They did.”

“You were right before the senior board was.”

Anita blinks.

The student realizes, too late, that she has said something with emotional weight. “I mean, the evidence supports your initial theory despite institutional resistance.”

Anita glances toward me.

I give her nothing but a calm look.

She looks back at the students, and something in her face softens. “Yes,” she says. “I was right about the ruins being older than the accepted model. I was also wrong about thinking being right would be the hard part.”

The group quiets.

Good.

Let them learn that from her before a ruin teaches it less kindly.

Anita continues, her voice steadier. “Curiosity got me through the first door. Responsibility kept me from opening all the others at once. If you take nothing else from this expedition, take that. Discovery is not a prize you drag home by the ankles. It is a relationship with consequences.”

One of the younger researchers whispers, “That is going on my wall.”

Anita points at him. “If you quote me, include the ankles. Otherwise it sounds too noble.”

Laughter breaks through the cluster.

I feel my own mouth move.

Sira appears beside me, silent as pale moonlight in travel robes the color of dawn mist. “You are smiling.”

“I do that now.”

“Yes. It remains striking.”

“She is happy.”

“She is allowing herself to be seen being happy,” Sira says. “That is the rarer thing.”

I look again at Anita. The students are asking questions faster now, and she is answering with patience, wit, and authority. No one is treating her as a reckless graduate student humored by older minds. No one is waiting for her to become smaller. They look at her the way she once looked at ruins: as if something extraordinary has surfaced from beneath a long dismissal.

“She earned it,” I say.

“She did.”

“She wanted this respect for years.”

“Yes.”

“And now that she has it, she is trying not to look directly at it.”

Sira’s smile is slight. “Happiness can be harder to accept than danger when one has trained for danger.”

I glance toward her. “That sounds like something you intend me to hear as well.”

“It applies broadly.”

“You have become less subtle since Nareth-Kul.”