ELLIOT
“It exists.”
Sera said it at seven in the morning on publication day, standing at the kitchen window with a copy in both hands, not reading it but holding it the way she held things she was receiving fully. The physical version of something that had previously existed only as process and intention and four o’clock mornings.
He was at the table with his coffee. He had been there since six, the way he was most mornings now, not because Calloway Street was his address but because it had become the place the day began properly. There was a quality to the kitchen in the early hours, the herbs on the windowsill and the garden through the glass and the stone from the coast and the person who had assembled all of it into a life that was genuinely, completely hers.
He looked at the cover
