She asked for the morning alone, which her family gave her without requiring explanation.Lucien had organised the birthday dinner for the evening: the children and their people, Blair and Thomas from Edinburgh, Tessy, the people who constituted her life. But he understood, having known her for twenty-five years, that before the gathering she would need the opposite, and he had arranged the morning accordingly, taking Marcus to his Saturday theatre programme, leaving the house with the particular quality of quiet that was different from absence because it was chosen.She had coffee at the kitchen table first, slowly, looking at the garden through the back window. October light, low and clear, the garden in the specific beauty of late autumn when things were ending without apology. She was fifty-five years old, which she held in her mind with the same calm she had arrived at regarding most facts about her own life: not resisted, not performed, just received.She had places she wanted t
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