Alexandre's POV
Tuesday arrived quietly.
This surprised me. I had expected the morning to carry the weight of the previous day — the article, the statement, the forty-seven notifications, the phone calls from people I had not spoken to in years who had apparently read four sentences and felt compelled to respond to them. I had expected to wake up into the specific noise of a crisis still running.
Instead I woke up to rain.
Paris in late October doing the thing it did when it decided the golden period was over — grey sky, steady rain, the particular sound of it on the window that belonged to no other city. Quiet. The kind of morning that reset things.
Claire was asleep.
This was — I was still adjusting to this. The specific reality of another person in the room. Not abstract, not nego
