ELLIOT
“She wants to talk to you about Zara.”
Nicole said it over the phone at nine in the morning with the particular tone she had developed across the last two months of their co-parenting conversations. Not warm exactly, but honest. The managed civility of two people who had agreed to prioritize something larger than their own discomfort and were discovering that the agreement required daily maintenance.
He was in his office for the first time in three days, having spent most of the week between Sera’s house and Harmon’s conference room and Vivienne’s kitchen, and the ordinary quality of sitting at his own desk felt slightly foreign in the way that familiar spaces felt when you had been away from them long enough for the familiarity to require recalibration.
“What does she want to s
