At 6:40 a.m., just as the sky was going gray-pink over the snow, headlights swung into the driveway.
Not a taxi. His car. He’d driven back from the airport.
I heard the car door slam, too hard. I heard his footsteps on the walk, fast and uneven. And then the pounding started on my front door — my front door, in my house — along with his voice, stripped now of all its silk, cracking on the single word he’d never once said to me and meant.
“Camille! Camille, please—”
I set down my tea.
I was not afraid. That was the thing I noticed, walking toward the door. For eleven years some part of me had been quietly afraid of that man’s moods, his contempt, his cold little cruelties. And now he was pounding on my door at dawn with his whole life on fire, and I felt nothing but a clean, professional calm.
