The address Dmitri Sorel gave me is a diner.
Not a compound, not a hotel, not any of the spaces I have been meeting people in for the past four weeks. A diner on the edge of a small town sixty miles from Varenholm, the kind of place that has been open since before the highway was rerouted and has been quietly indifferent to the rerouting ever since. Red vinyl booths. Coffee in ceramic mugs. The smell of everything that has ever been cooked here accumulated into a single, specific, completely inoffensive warmth.
I chose the booth facing the door, as always.
Faye is beside me rather than across, as has become the natural grammar of the way we occupy spaces together. She ordered coffee. She is reading the laminated menu with the focused attention she brings to everything, which on a lamina
