He came back on a Saturday morning.
I heard the vehicle at six forty.
Not from my room, I had been in the kitchen since before four, the way I was always in the kitchen since before four, the specific gravitational pull of the one space in this house that had always been mine in the dark hours and that I did not intend to give up simply because the dark hours now contained more than they used to. I had made coffee. I had started the breakfast service. I had moved through the familiar stations with the practiced efficiency that lived below the level of thought and I had let my mind do what it needed to do, which was run the previous night's conversation with Theo through its paces one more time, examining each piece from each available angle, testing the structure of it against what I kne
