MONDAY
The email arrived on a Friday.
Four days after the interview — four days of telling myself I'd not been thinking about it, which was the specific lie of someone who had thought about almost nothing else. I'd gone to The Meridian on the days I was scheduled, and I'd done my work, and I'd collected Liam from school and made dinner and sat at the kitchen table in the evenings and performed the ordinary texture of a life continuing normally.
I performed well.
Jasmine hadn't been fooled for a single day.
She said nothing — which was its own kind of saying something, the specific eloquence of a person who understood that some waiting required company rather than commentary. She was simply present in the evenings. She made tea without being asked. She sat in her studio corner and work
