This was not an accident. Sera had started building these two months ago, not every week, but with enough regularity that they had become a real feature of her schedule rather than an oversight. She had not announced it to anyone. She had simply started doing it and found that the mornings she protected this way were different in quality from the ones she did not.
She made her own coffee.
Rosa was not yet in. The kitchen was quiet and entirely hers, the particular quality of an early morning in a house before anyone else arrived to inhabit it. She measured the coffee, waited while it ran, poured it into the cup she had been using since she was twenty-two. The one she always reached for without deciding to.
She took it to the sitting room.
The flowers were on the small table beside the
