I woke on Christmas morning to silence.
Not the anxious silence of the insomnia weeks: the warm, complete silence of a man who had slept for nine and a half hours and was now waking because his body had decided it was done, not because an alarm had demanded it.
The penthouse was quiet. The city outside was quiet. London on Christmas Day was the only morning of the year when the traffic genuinely stopped, when the sirens slept, when the eight million people who made the capital roar had agreed, by collective, unspoken decision, to be still for a few hours.
Emma was next to me, her red hair spread across the pillow, her breathing slow. She was wearing one of my t-shirts, the grey one she had claimed six months ago and never returned, which was now officially hers in the way that many of my things were officially hers.
The December sun, weak and low, was pushing through the gap in the curtains and drawing a warm line across her shoulder.
