It came from Robert.
Julia hadn't expected that.
She'd expected it to come from within from one of the quiet moments between her and Daniel, the kind they'd gotten good at using honestly. Or perhaps from Nora, who had a way of locating the precise unspoken thing and stating it at breakfast with complete casualness.
But it came from Robert.
On a Sunday.
He'd started coming for Sunday lunch not every week, just some of them, tentatively at first and then with the growing ease of something that was becoming a habit worth keeping. He brought things sometimes. A bottle of wine. Once, inexplicably, a plant that Nora immediately named and incorporated into her ecosystem of named objects.
He was getting better at being there.
Not perfectly. Not without the occasional stiffness of someone
