Claire's POV
I cried in the car on the way home.
Not dramatically — not the kind of crying that requires explanation or produces sounds. The quiet kind. The kind that arrives without warning when you have been holding something carefully for a very long time and one small thing — a child's hands cupped around a worm, a word said through a glass door without ceremony — causes the structural integrity of the whole careful hold to give way without permission.
Theo was asleep in his car seat within four minutes of leaving the 16th arrondissement. He did this — crashed completely after mornings of high emotional and physical investment, going from full operational capacity to deeply unconscious with no intermediate stage. I envied it. I had not slept that efficiently in three years.
I drove
