I waited until evening.
Not because I needed the time to compose myself, I was composed, the walk had done that, the long purposeful movement through the autumn city that always organised my thoughts into the order they needed to be in. I waited because the question I was going to ask deserved the right architecture, and the right architecture was not a text message or a phone call or a conversation conducted over the penthouse kitchen counter while one of us was still half-inside the professional day.
It deserved stillness. And privacy. And Lucien with nothing else to manage.
I went to the penthouse at seven. He was there, which I had known he would be, the evening meetings finished, the professional register lowered by several degrees into the version of him that existed in the pre-da
