We came back to New York on a Sunday afternoon.
The city received us the way it always did, without ceremony, without adjustment, ten million lives continuing their particular business with no acknowledgment that we had been gone three days or that three days had contained a mountain terrace and a conversation about horses and a snowy path and three heartbeats in the cold that I was still carrying somewhere underneath my sternum and had not yet decided what to do with.
Lucien's driver took me to my apartment. Lucien had a call scheduled for six, which he had apologised for and I had told him not to apologise for, because we were still, in some register, two people who did not owe each other their evenings. The arrangement allowed for that. The renegotiation had not changed the basic arch
