Wednesday I woke up and nothing was different.
Same flat. Same light through the curtain. Same city doing its early morning inventory outside.
But I lay there for a moment before getting up and noticed that the weight I usually woke with the low-level vigilance, the early assessment of whether today was going to be manageable was not where it usually was. It was still there. Just quieter. Like something that had been playing at one volume for so long I'd stopped hearing it as noise, and now, for the first time, the dial had moved.
I didn't analyse it.
I got up. Made coffee. Stood at the window.
He had seen the flinch.
He had seen the fear at its least dignified, most exposed, most animal. Had seen my body decide he was a threat before my mind could intervene. Had seen the shame that
