The first morning.
Not the first morning he'd stayed — he'd stayed before, since the Tuesday in April, with the quiet regularity of something that had happened before anyone had explicitly decided it would. But the first morning as the actual arrangement. The first morning that was not a visit.
She woke at six-fifteen as she always woke, before the alarm, with the specific consciousness of someone whose body had understood for years that the day required preparation. He was awake already, which she'd learned to expect — she'd never known him to sleep past six in the months she'd observed his mornings. He was at the kitchen table with coffee and his phone, doing what he did in the early part of any day: reading, assessing, the quiet intelligence-gathering of a man whose job was to underst
