I gave her the tour.The house received Jennifer the way it received everything, with its particular quality of established permanence, the rooms doing what they always did regardless of who was moving through them. Jennifer moved through them with the specific Jennifer quality, the noticing, the commentary, the way she had always been in spaces — fully present in them, reading them with the attention of someone who believed houses told you things.The library.The sitting room.The formal dining room, which she looked at for a long time.“You eat here every night?” she said.“Yes,” I said.She looked at the table. The length of it. The three places that would be set at seven.“With your mum,” she said.“Yes,” I said.“And her husband,” she said.“Yes,” I said.She looked at the table.She looked at me.I kept my face doing the normal face.She said nothing yet. This was the Jennifer method — the looking, the filing, the saying nothing until she had enough to say something worth sayin
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