It arrived on a Monday.
Not an email. Not a message through a lawyer or a communications team or any of the modern channels that important and uncomfortable things usually travel through. An actual letter. Cream envelope, heavy paper, handwritten address in careful precise script. Slipped through the door of the apartment building and left with the concierge who brought it up personally with the expression of someone who understood that whatever was inside it was not ordinary correspondence.
Damien was at the office.
I was in the library.
I opened it at the kitchen counter with the afternoon light coming through the window and the city below moving through its ordinary Monday and I read it once and then I set it down flat on the counter and stood very still for a long time.
Then I rea
