Alexandre's POV
I was at the kitchen table by seven.
Not working — sitting with coffee and the paper newspaper and the specific awareness of a man who had woken up knowing that the woman on the other side of the house would come downstairs at some point and sit at this table and that this had become the organising fact of his mornings.
Four weeks since a photograph slid across my desk.
Four weeks since a pebble at a blue gate. A ship bed. Gerald on the counter. Pizza Friday. The arrangement that had stopped being an arrangement somewhere around week two and become something I didn't have a clean word for.
She appeared at seven twenty-two.
Dressing gown. Hair loose. The version of Claire that existed before the professional composure assembled itself — the version I had stopped preten
