Vivienne's POV
I cooked dinner.
Not for any particular reason except that cooking required my hands and my attention and the combination of the two was useful when my mind was doing the thing it had been doing for three days since Ella's office. Moving over the same ground repeatedly. The file. The photograph. The charity dinner eight months ago. The smile that was already ending.
Charles arrived at seven with wine he had chosen carefully, which I knew because he always chose wine carefully, and came into the kitchen and stood at the counter and watched me work the way he sometimes did when he wasn't needed and didn't pretend to be.
We ate at the table.
The conversation was easy through most of it. That was the thing about what we had built across these months. The easy conversation h
