She told Dante the next morning.
He was in the doorway with the briefing folder before she had finished her first coffee, the ordinary start to an ordinary Wednesday, and she looked up and said it before she had worked out how to say it.
"I'm going to the opera with Roman," she said.
Dante went still in the doorway.
"As in?" he started.
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her. The specific look he used when he was receiving significant information and was deciding what to do with it.
"Sera," he said.
"I know," she said.
"Are you sure?"
She looked at the coffee cup in front of her. She thought about the text she had read on Tuesday afternoon. The specific thing that had happened in her chest when she read it. The recognition of something small and particular that she had never told him
