Vivienne's POV
He called at seven fourteen.
I was in my kitchen attempting something with pasta that had started as a reasonable ambition and declined steadily into a negotiation between what I had intended to make and what the available ingredients were willing to cooperate with. My phone was on the counter beside the stove. When it lit up with a number I didn't recognise I almost let it go to voicemail on the basis that unknown numbers at seven fourteen on a Friday evening were rarely anything that improved the situation they arrived into.
Something made me answer.
"Vivienne." His voice. Unmistakable. That particular unhurried quality that I had catalogued across weeks of restaurant visits and was apparently sufficiently embedded in my recognition that I identified it before he said
