Six months passed.
Not quietly, nothing in our lives had learned to be quiet but ordinarily. Which was, I had come to understand, the better thing. Ordinary meant the crisis was over. Ordinary meant the war had ended and what remained was the specific, sustaining texture of a life being lived rather than survived.
The climbing rose along the south wall had grown six inches.
I measured it on the first of every month with the slightly obsessive attention of someone who has invested emotionally in a plant and is monitoring its progress as a proxy for everything else that is slowly, properly growing.
Lucas had grown considerably more than six inches and was making his opinions known about this with a volume and consistency that suggested he had inherited both Lucian's intensity and my st
