ROSE’S POV
He came on a Wednesday.
Not the usual night. Edmund had patterns I had learned the way you learn everything about a person you are paying close attention to, which is to say thoroughly and without intending to, until one day you realize you know the architecture of someone else’s week better than you know your own.
Tuesdays and Thursdays were ours when the schedule allowed it. Wednesday was his late board evening, which ran until nine and left him, by his own account, too drained for anything requiring sustained presence.
He had texted at seven-fifteen. “Coming over. Thirty minutes.”
I had read it twice. Not because the message was complicated but because something in its brevity felt different from the usual brevity, compressed in a way that suggested not efficiency but
