The Hamptons weekend ended on a Sunday afternoon.
The drive back was quiet in the way that post-performance quiet always is, the particular exhaustion of sustained presentation, the slow release of a face that has been arranged for two days. Lucien read something on his phone. I looked out the window. The city appeared on the horizon eventually, grey and certain, and I thought about Cassian's voice on the terrace and the badly made coffee and the thing I had seen in Lucien's face in the kitchen and had been carrying since, carefully, the way you carry something fragile in a crowd.
I thought about it all the way back to the penthouse.
I was staying there more nights than not now, which had become true so gradually I hadn't noticed it happening until it had already happened. My apartment
