DOMINIC
I woke up because the light changed.
That was the first thing. The way the morning came through the windows was different on her side of the bed — that was what made me conscious before anything else. The light was in the wrong place.
The second thing I became aware of was that the pillow barrier was gone.
The third thing was that Elena was asleep on my side of the bed. Not at the edge. Not close to the edge. In the middle, curled on her side with one hand open against the mattress and her face turned toward me and her hair across the pillow in a way that made her look nothing like the Elena who crossed out contract clauses and reorganised my entire filing system and told me with absolute certainty that my coffee pods were a chaos.
She was warm and completely still and her fis
