He came back at three.
I heard the knock at the front door and opened it and he stood in the hallway with the February cold still on him and an expression I couldn't immediately read — not the closed, managed version he wore when something was being held back, but something more open than that. Processing rather than concealing.
"Come in," I said.
He came in.
He sat on the couch without taking his coat off, which meant he was still somewhere else partially, still in whatever room Isabelle had been in when she'd said what she'd needed to say. I sat in the chair across from him and waited.
"She's going back to London," he said.
I looked at him.
"Permanently," he said. "She's been offered a senior partnership at her old firm. She said she'd been considering it since November but had be
