December arrived like a locked room, cold and close. The city went Christmas-gold around us — shop windows lit, trees strung with light along Park Avenue, the particular compressed warmth of a city that turns inward in winter. In the apartment, in the evenings after our respective days, the warmth was different, it was quieter, more specific, and the kind that builds without announcement. We had developed habits without meaning to. This was the thing that no contract anticipated, the small accumulations of shared space that create their own gravity.We eat Breakfast at seven like almost always together now — I drank my coffee and he drank his and we read separate things and it required no conversation to be comfortable. I knew he didn’t read news before nine AM, that he needed twenty minutes alone after calls longer than an hour, that he was sharper in the evenings than the mornings, and that he had a tell when he was troubled — he’d touch his watch, not to check the time, just the g
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