They gave us the kitchen at two in the afternoon.
Not formally. Not with the specific announcement of people clearing a space deliberately. It happened the way things happened in a house that had been running on the specific careful logistics of a significant situation for long enough that the people inside it had learned to read what was needed and provide it without being asked. Theo took the boundary provision files to the east sitting room. Damon went with him, the flat decisive choice of a man who understood that the conversation about to happen in the kitchen was not his to be present for and who removed himself from it with the same deliberate quality with which he had stood beside me in the corridor, the specific understanding that the right thing to offer was sometimes his absenc
