Sunday arrived quietly, the way Sundays do when they carry weight.
No specific event. No meeting, no contact from Lucas, no developments that required action. Just the particular stillness of a day that existed between two more significant ones, Thursday’s confirmation behind me and Monday’s meeting ahead, and the Whitmore house doing what it always did on Sundays, moving through its domestic rhythms with the particular self-satisfaction of a household that believed its routines were permanent.
I let it.
I came downstairs at eight, made coffee, read for an hour in the kitchen while the house woke around me. Mrs. Carter arrived at half past eight and we shared the kitchen in our customary comfortable silence until Margaret appeared at nine and the register of the room shifted in the subt
