I heard her before I saw her.

The terrace door was ajar, the specific and particular quality of a door left open by someone who had not been thinking about doors, who had gone through it with her hands occupied and had not thought to close it behind her, who was now doing something on the other side of it that required both attention and distance from the interior of the penthouse. I was coming down the hallway from the study, where I had been for most of the afternoon doing the particular and performed version of working that I had been doing since I got back from Aldous, and...