I got up at five forty seven.
I dressed in the dark with the practiced silence of a man who had been doing difficult things quietly for as long as he could remember, finding my shirt by touch, my trousers by memory, my shoes at the foot of the chair where I always left them. She did not stir. She had moved in her sleep at some point, turned onto her side facing the window, the duvet pulled to her shoulder, her hair a dark copper mass across the white pillow. I looked at her for a moment I was not going to count and then I picked up my phone and my jacket and I walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind me with a silence I had trained into instinct.
The apartment was grey and undecided in the early morning light. Paris at this hour was a different city from Paris at any other ho
