Rose’s POV
He came at nine.
I had known he would, not because he had said so, but because I had learned the rhythm of Edmund’s weeks, the specific architecture of how he distributed himself between his life and whatever category our arrangement fell into. Tuesday evenings, when his last meeting ended before eight and the night opened up with no obligations requiring his public face, he came here. It had become its own kind of routine. The kind that feels like commitment when you’re inside it and like pattern when you’re far enough outside to look.
I had been trying to decide which one it was for three weeks.
I opened the door when he knocked and he came in the way he always did, filling the space, his presence occupying a room differently from most people, the specific gravitational
