Vivienne's POV
The apartment had never held this many people.
Not in the four years I had lived in it. It was a large apartment by any reasonable measure but it had always been a space for one person living deliberately and alone and the furniture and the light and the specific arrangement of everything in it reflected that.
Today it reflected something else.
Today it was full.
....
My mother had been up since six.
I had found her in the kitchen when I came out at seven making the kind of breakfast that required multiple elements happening simultaneously, the specific organised chaos of a woman who expressed love through feeding people and had a room full of people to feed.
She had looked at me when I came in.
I had looked at her.
We had not talked about Charles and Louis and the
