He thought: I have been looking at this face from a distance for fifteen months and I have been learning, in that distance, what I should have been learning from the beginning. How to see her. How to look.
He thought: Saturday. I will look.
He got up. He went back to the study.
He called Gerald.
"Saturday," he said. "She called."
Gerald was quiet for a moment. "What do you need from me?"
"Nothing," Lucien said. "I just — needed to tell someone."
A pause. "That's new," Gerald said.
"Yes," Lucien said. "I know."
Friday was, as far as Lina was concerned, a normal Friday.
This was a deliberate choice. She had watched herself, in the weeks before important things in her first life, build toward them with a scaffolding of preparation and rehearsal and contingency planning that was exhausting and that had never once produced the outcome she had rehearsed. She had prepared for thirty years of marriage to a man who hadn't prepared for it at all, and preparation had not helped her.
