It started with rain and a photographer who had very poor timing.
We were leaving a restaurant on the Upper East Side, just the two of us, the kind of dinner that was on the schedule Cassian maintained, visible enough to serve the arrangement, quiet enough not to require much performance. It had gone the way most of our dinners went now, which was to say: we talked about things that were not us, the city, a book I was reading, a restructuring happening inside Drax Industries that Lucien explained with the particular economy of a man who understood complex things and had learned not to assume others didn't, and I listened and responded and tried not to notice how much I had started looking forward to these evenings.
I was noticing. I was just not saying so.
The photographer was waiting o
