Nina stayed for three days.
Three days of pastries and long kitchen conversations and opinions about everything from the furniture to the book arrangement in the library which she described as chronologically inconsistent and which Damien defended with the calm certainty of a man who had organised it deliberately and was not remotely apologetic about it.
They argued about it for twenty minutes on the second morning.
I sat at the counter and drank my coffee and watched them and thought about how completely and unexpectedly this had all turned out.
By the end of the second day they had reached an agreement about the library that involved rearranging one shelf and leaving everything else exactly as it was. Nina declared this a victory. Damien said nothing about it which was its own kind o
