Chapter 36: October
Thursday came. Grey sky. Cold morning. The kind of autumn day that arrived without announcement and settled over everything with the quiet authority of a season that had decided it was time. I dressed carefully. Not for effect. For the same reason I had learned to dress carefully in rooms where what I wore was the first thing people read before they decided how to listen. A dark dress. A coat the colour of slate. My mother's ring on my right hand, which I had not worn since the collapse and had taken from the small box in the north wing drawer the night before without deliberating about it. It belonged in that room. Adrian was in the entrance hall when I came downstairs. He looked at me. Not the assessment. Not the careful measurement of the early weeks. Something past that. Somet
- Writer
