JULIAN

Thirty seconds.

I want to account for the thirty seconds because the thirty seconds was not the ordinary thirty seconds of a room in the late evening, not the specific and unremarkable thirty seconds of the gap between one thing and the next. It was the thirty seconds of a man looking at a laptop with the full and deliberate application of his available management while the specific and complete fact of her not-moving was in his peripheral awareness in the particular and total way of a fact that was not in the periphery at all, that was in the direct center of every piece of him that was...