Seven years from the conference room.
We did not go to the coast.
We stayed at the estate because the estate was the story now, because the coast was a chapter and the estate was the whole book, and because on the morning of the seventh anniversary Damien came downstairs and found Rose in the library with her notebook and Thomas at the kitchen table with a drawing and Mrs. Aldren with the breakfast already assembled and the whole house in the particular quality of a morning that is fully itself and I was standing at the east garden window with coffee watching the garden in its October form.
He stood beside me.
“Seven years,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
The October garden did its work.
The east morning light came through the window the way Callum had designed it.
“The conference room fe
