REBECCA’S POV
He asked if we could have dinner together when the lamb was nearly finished.
Not “do you want to have dinner or shall we eat soon”. He asked if we could have dinner together, quietly, with the specific formality of a request rather than the casual assumption he had always used when the house was running on my rhythms. I said yes.
I set the table the way I had always set it for the evenings that were meant to feel easy, the good placemats, the candles, the specific domestic choreography that I had performed ten thousand times without knowing it was performance.
We sat across from each other with the lamb between us and the candlelight making the dining room feel intimate in a way that had been genuine once and was now something I was orchestrating with the precision I h
