I could not remember.
My father's kitchen had staff. Staff who appeared and produced things and disappeared again, efficient and invisible, furniture in human form. There had never been a person in an ordinary grey pullover standing at an ordinary stove making an ordinary thing because it was morning and morning required eating.
He put a plate in front of me.
Eggs, done properly, soft in the middle the way they should be and almost never are. Bread that had been in the oven long enough to be warm and had not gone past it. A small dish of butter. Half a grapefruit with the segments already cut, which was the kind of detail that required a knife and a board and the decision to bother, and he had bothered, and I looked at it and felt something move in my chest that I pressed down immediate
