She called him at noon.
Not with anger, she'd sat with it long enough that the heat had settled into something more useful. More precise.
"Can you come tonight?" she said.
"Yes," he said. "Is everything alright?"
"Everything is fine," she said. "I just need to talk to you about something."
He came at seven.
Nora was still awake. They were in the middle of a negotiation about bedtime that Nora was conducting with the strategic patience of someone who understood that the longer the conversation went on the later it got.
Daniel walked into the middle of it.
He looked at Julia.
She looked at him.
"Bed," she said to Nora. "Now. Daniel will come and say goodnight in ten minutes."
Nora assessed the room the particular quality of the adult atmosphere, the things children read before t
