DOMINIC
She did not come back that night.
At eleven I texted: Are you all right?
She replied: I'm at Maya's. I'm fine.
I looked at those two sentences for a long time.
Then I put the phone face down on the desk and sat in the office with the quiet that had changed shape again — not the two-person quiet of the past months, not even the held-breath quiet of the two days after the worst fight. This was the original quiet. The one that had lived here for seven years before she came in and rearranged everything.
I had not realised how much I hated the original quiet until it was back.
The penthouse looked like itself. Her things were in it — the books on the shelf, the notes on the office door, the coffee pods organised by roast in the cabinet on the right. The real-desk in the room that
