She stared at the ceiling.

She thought: he didn't expect this. Neither did I. This was not in the plan.

She thought: he has been careful. He has been, lately, he has been…

She stopped the thought before it finished.

Because the specific and particular danger of the last few weeks, the kitchen mornings, the garden evenings, the quality of his attention was that it had asked her to begin updating an internal model she had built with considerable care in September, a model called this is a transaction and the warmth is incidental and which had been showing, under the pressure of recent data, significant structural cracks. She had...