บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love : บทที่ 221 - บทที่ 230

In May of the eleventh year Don said: "I want to read the journal."They were in the study, both journals on the desk, the May morning coming through the study window in that particular way May has—not the sharp light of March or the heavy gold of September but something in between, a light that seemed to hold the promise of summer without yet committing to it. Ernest looked up from the correspondence. The correspondence was about the book's final permissions, a tedious thing involving a quotation from a poem whose rights had changed hands twice since the poem was written. He had been working through it with the patience he brought to things that needed doing but did not need his full attention, and Don's voice had drawn him out of the half-attention entirely."Which part," he said. Not a refusal. A request for specification. The journal was large, eleven years of entries across multiple volumes, and Don had read most of it already in pieces—had been reading it for years, in fact, sin

In July of the eleventh year there was a difficulty.It was not the kind of difficulty they had had in the earlier years—not the collision of the managed distances, not the wall or the clearing conversation. Those difficulties had been large, structural, the kind that threatened the entire arrangement if not resolved. This difficulty was smaller. It was the kind of difficulty the eleventh year produced: the small, specific friction of people whose closeness was now so well-established that the friction could occur in places the earlier years would not have reached.The difficulty was about the next trip.They had been in the eleventh year without a planned trip, which was new—since Portugal in the fifth year there had always been a trip planned, always a forward thing on the horizon in the form of a specific place and a specific preparation. Portugal had been the first, then Greece in the sixth year, then the combination of Norway and Istanbul in the seventh and eighth, then the compr

November of the eleventh year was the month Don began the next argument.He had waited, as he had said he would wait, until the book was near enough to the world that the next argument could begin without the book requiring the space. The book was printed. The publication was four months away. The space was sufficient.The autumn had been wet—more rain than usual, the kind of rain that turned the ground to mud and kept them indoors for days at a time. Don had used the rainy days to read, to think, to let the next argument form in the space that the book's completion had cleared. Ernest had watched this process from the study, had seen Don sitting by the east window with a book in his lap and his gaze on the rain, had recognized the quality of attention as the attention of someone who was not reading but was waiting for something to arrive.He came to the study on a Tuesday morning with the expression that Ernest recognized as the beginning-expression: the quality of someone who has a

Thomas came on the Monday after the book arrived.He came at nine, as he had come for twelve years. The gate was unlocked—it was always unlocked on Mondays, the arrangement that had been established in the first year and had never needed revision. Thomas opened the gate himself. He walked up the path. He had the quality of someone who was arriving for the regular work but who knew that this Monday was different.Don met him at the kitchen garden gate.Not inside, not at the kitchen table, not in the study where the arguments were made. At the gate. Don had decided this. Ernest had seen him decide it—had seen him stand at the window at half past eight, looking toward the gate, had seen him make the small movement of the head that indicated a decision had been reached. Don would meet Thomas at the gate. The book would be given there. The gate was the boundary between the estate and the house, between the garden and the study, between Thomas's domain and Don's. It was the appropriate pla

Thomas came on the second Monday of April.He arrived at nine, which was the established time. He had his programme for the twelfth year's spring. He had, in the inside pocket of his coat, a copy of the review from the gardening journal — not a literary publication, the gardening journal that was among the specialist publications that had reviewed The Inside Account on the grounds that it contained, in the estate piece and in the developing argument about the ground-knowledge, a contribution to the understanding of the relationship between person and place that was relevant to serious gardeners and landscape practitioners. The review had been sent to Don by the editor. Thomas had found it in the same journal, which he read.He said at the gate, before looking at the foxgloves: "The gardening journal."Don looked at him. "You read it.""I read it every month," Thomas said. "The review was accurate." He said it in the tone of someone reporting a fact that gave him satisfaction without r