บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love : บทที่ 171 - บทที่ 180

December in the seventh year had a quality that Ernest had to distinguish from December in the sixth year, because the distinction mattered.The sixth December had been the year's ending in the mode of completion—the east wing decided, Greece booked, the promise named and understood to be larger, the forward orientation established. It had been the December of the fully assembled building plan. The plan had been complete: the east wing would be built in the seventh year, the trips would continue, the writing would continue, the promise would be named in the eighth year. Everything had been laid out, clear as a map.The seventh of December was different. The plan had been executed—the east wing was done and open, Greece had been taken and had given what it gave and more, the second piece was accepted, Norway was in the planning. The seventh December was not the end of a plan. It was the end of a year in which the plan had become real. The map had been walked. The territory had been exp

Ernest wrote the seventh year's accounting on the thirty-first of December.He did this earlier in the day than the sixth year's accounting—not in the evening but in the afternoon, which was a change whose reason he examined in the writing. He wrote: I am writing the accounting earlier today than in previous years. I think this is because the seventh year is so full that accounting requires more time. The sixth year was the year of the naming. The seventh year is the year the named things became actual and each actuality requires its own entry in the accounting.He wrote the accounting in the manner he had established: the specific things of the year, in the order they had arrived, without editorializing beyond the factual statement of what had happened and why it mattered.He wrote: The east wing. Opened on the fourteenth of November. The room is the right room. Reeve built it correctly. The modified north windows produce the morning light that changes the room from what the plans co

They flew to Bergen on a Thursday in the second week of February.The flight was two and a half hours and arrived in the early afternoon. Ernest had chosen the Thursday arrival specifically: it gave them the remainder of Thursday and the full Friday before the weekend, which in Bergen in February was still largely the locals' weekend — the tourist infrastructure of summer not yet assembled, the city in its own rhythm, the rhythm they had come to find.The morning of the flight, Don had woken earlier than usual. Ernest had heard him moving in the adjacent room of the east wing — not the restless movement of anxiety but the purposeful movement of preparation. Don had laid out his clothes the night before: layers, the wool sweater from the shop in the Lake District, the waterproof coat Ernest had insisted on after researching Bergen's February climate. Don had resisted the coat initially — too bulky, too technical — but Ernest had shown him the precipitation statistics and Don had conced

On Sunday Bergen had its darkest day of the trip.Not literally — the days were already lengthening, by February the solstice was two months past and the light was returning at approximately five minutes per day. But the weather system that arrived on Sunday morning was the specific Bergen weather that closed the city in cloud and rain and reduced the visibility to the harbor and no further: the mountains invisible, the sky and the sea the same color, the city in its weather-bounded state.They did not go out in the morning. They sat in the hotel room — Don with his notebook, Ernest with the journal — and inhabited the indoor Bergen that was also Bergen, the Bergen that had been inhabited indoors for two hundred rainy days a year for however many years the city had been a city.The rain on Sunday was not the gentle rain of English springs — the kind of rain that seemed almost apologetic, that fell as if it were sorry for the inconvenience. The rain on Sunday was the rain of the North

They returned from Norway on a Saturday.The return flight was from Bergen, which required the train back from Flåm — the ascending Flåm railway, the right side now the left side going up, which was still the correct side because the views were still on the right of the descending direction and the ascending direction put them on the left. Don sat on the left on the way back up. He had not been told. He had looked at the window and chosen the correct side.Ernest noticed this without comment. It was a small thing and exactly accurate: Don had learned, over the three days in Flåm and the two days in Bergen before that, the correct way to inhabit this particular landscape, and he applied the learning without requiring instruction.The morning of the departure from Flåm, Don had woken before dawn again. Ernest found him standing at the window of their small hotel room — a room with a view of the fjord, which in the pre-dawn darkness was black water with the mountains silhouetted against