The writing changed things.
Not the writing itself, the act of putting words down, but what the act required, which was going back through all the rooms of the story and examining each one with more care than the living of them had allowed.
I wrote in the library, mornings mostly, after Rose had been delivered to the small group of children she spent her Tuesday and Thursday mornings with in the village, in the company of a woman named Bev who was approximately Mrs. Aldren’s equivalent in the preschool context, which is to say completely indispensable and entirely aware of it.
On the mornings I wrote, Damien left for the tower later than usual.
He did not say this was related to the writing. He simply left later, appearing in the library doorway at nine with a second cup of coffee he d
