The demolition team arrived at seven on Monday morning.
I watched from the east-facing bedroom window, what had been the master suite and was being reclaimed, room by room, from the ghost of the marriage that had occupied it as three men in hard hats marked the west wing perimeter with orange flags. It was a precise, professional process, entirely without drama. Buildings come down the same way most things come down, methodically, by someone who does it for a living, with the specific dispassion of work rather than emotion.
Lucian stood on the lawn below the window. He had his coffee. He watched the flags go in with the expression of a man completing something he had been working toward for a long time and finding that the completion felt less like triumph and more like weather changing
