Friday arrived with the particular quality of a Friday in December — the end of a week that had carried more interior weather than it had shown on the surface, moving into the cold, clear light of a California winter morning that looked the same as every other morning and was not.
Nathan had spent the second half of the week doing what he had decided to do, which was the thing the argument had always required and which he had been doing with varying degrees of success since September. Distance. The professional register locked back into place with the deliberate, practiced quality of a man who knows where the switch is and has made a decision to use it. He called on her no more than he called on anyone. He returned her marked comprehension response with the same face-down, impersonal dist
