The cottage on the Norfolk coast was not a home, not yet. It was a beautiful, windswept limbo. For ten days, Eleanor and Dominic moved through the grey stone rooms and the wild, salt-scrubbed gardens with the cautious grace of two bomb disposal experts, afraid that one wrong word, one misplaced glance, would detonate the fragile peace they had built.
The rhythm was deceptively simple. Dominic would rise at dawn, his body still wired for a city that never slept, and build a fire in the large, stone hearth. Eleanor would wake to the scent of woodsmoke and the sound of the kettle whistling—a sound he had learned was her true alarm clock. He made her tea, mastering the precise two-minute steep of the chamomile, and brought it to her in the bedroom that overlooked the sea. He never entered unl
