I woke before dawn on the second morning.
Old habit, the pre-dawn waking that I had developed somewhere in the first weeks of the arrangement when everything was new and my body hadn't learned to sleep through it yet. I lay still for a moment in the mountain dark, conscious of the particular quality of the silence on the other side of the bed, the careful, too-even breathing of a man who was also awake and had decided not to announce it.
I got up quietly. I dressed without turning on the light. I went downstairs and found the kitchen and made coffee, properly, and took it outside onto the stone terrace that faced east, where the mountains were just beginning to separate themselves from the sky, dark against slightly less dark, the slow, enormous process of a new day arriving whether or n
