บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love : บทที่ 241 - บทที่ 250

In June of the thirteenth year Don asked Thomas a question he had not asked before.They were in the kitchen garden — the established configuration of the ground-knowledge interviews, Thomas working and Don beside him with the notebook. The arrangement had become so familiar by the thirteenth year that neither man marked its beginning anymore. Don simply appeared at the kitchen garden gate with the notebook at whatever hour Thomas had begun his work, and Thomas acknowledged his arrival with a nod or a word about what he was doing — "the quinces are asking for water" or "the foxgloves have sent their first volunteers into the central beds" — and then they fell into the working-alongside silence that the interviews had produced as their natural form: the silence of the doing, and then the question that the doing had raised.The June morning was cool for June, which Thomas had noted earlier — "a cool June means the roses will be late but the foxgloves will be long" — and the quality of t

On a Sunday in August in the thirteenth year they sat in the kitchen garden in the late afternoon and said very little.This was a different category from the not-speaking of the early years — the managed silence of two people maintaining distance, the silence that had been full of things not said, of boundaries maintained, of the careful choreography of two men who were living together but were not yet ready to acknowledge what that meant. The early years' silence had been a form of protection — a way of being in the same room without having to be in the same relationship, a way of sharing space without sharing the self. Ernest had written about it in the journal, in the third year, when the silence was still new and still strange and still full of the weight of things unspoken.The thirteenth year's silence was different. This was the not-speaking of two people who had been speaking for thirteen years and had, on a Sunday afternoon in August, simply run out of the need to say things

Thomas came on the second Monday of April in the fourteenth year.The fourteenth year had arrived with the quality of a year that was not a round number and was therefore simply itself — not the tenth year's legibility as a threshold, not the twelfth year's publication quality, not the thirteenth year's reflection, but something else entirely. The fourteenth year was the year in the middle of the building, the year that was fully inside the accumulation without the threshold quality that made certain years feel significant. Ernest had found this was a different kind of good year: not the significant year but the well-established year, the year that knew what it was because it had so many previous years to know itself by.The morning was cool and clear — a proper April morning, with the quality of light that Thomas said was the gardener's light, the light that showed the first growth of the spring without the harshness of the summer sun. The kitchen garden was waking from its winter sl

In the spring of the fifteenth year Thomas made a recommendation.He made it at the kitchen garden gate on the second Monday of March, which was the Monday he came before the programme review, the Monday of the pre-programme assessment. He came and walked the estate before the formal programme discussion, the walking that told him what the estate needed that the previous year's programme had not yet addressed.The pre-programme assessment had been Thomas's practice since the early years of the arrangement — longer, probably, since Thomas had been doing this work long before Ernest arrived. The walking before the formal discussion was how Thomas prepared. He could not sit at a table and produce the programme from memory. He had to walk the estate, see what the winter had done, see what the spring was beginning to do, see what the previous year's work had produced or failed to produce. The walking was the seeing. The seeing was the knowing. The Knowing was the programme.Thomas came to

The fifteenth year had a quality that Ernest tried to name and found the naming required the full journal entry.He had been writing the quarterly accountings since the sixth year and the annual accountings since the first year and the daily record since the first year's first entry. The fifteenth year's mid-year accounting was the most difficult to find the accurate sentence for — not because the year was difficult, but because the fifteenth year was so deeply inside the accumulation that the outside view was entirely unavailable. He was inside the fifteenth year the way the person is inside the Hagia Sophia: enclosed, the outside view not accessible, the inside the only account.The Hagia Sophia analogy came to him in June of the fifteenth year. He had been thinking about the building — the actual building, the physical structure of the house and the estate — and about the experience of being inside something so large that you could not see its outside. The Hagia Sophia was like tha