They didn't talk about what it was for another two weeks.
It existed between them in the space where definitions would have gone — in the way he called on Saturday evenings without a stated reason, in the way she left the back door of the kitchen unlocked on Tuesday mornings without being asked. They moved around it the way you move around furniture in the dark: carefully, aware of the shape of it without needing to name it.
It was Bree who forced the issue, as Bree tended to do.
She arrived at the kitchen on a Monday to find Rafe's bike parked outside — he'd stopped by to drop off a jar of local honey from Hatch, who kept bees and had decided Ellie needed to try the autumn harvest. Bree walked in, looked at Rafe at the counter eating a test cookie with the focused appreciation of a man
