The office was cold the way it always was in the morning.... the fire not yet built up to its full work, the light coming through the north-facing windows at the angle that made everything look precise and unforgiving.
Vivienne sat at her desk.
The quarterly supply ledger was open in front of her.
She had been looking at it for twenty minutes.
She had not read a single line.
'Focus,' she told herself, which was something she had been telling herself at approximately four-minute intervals since sitting down, and which had not worked on any of the previous attempts and showed no signs of working on this one.
She looked at the numbers.
The numbers meant nothing. They were just numbers. They sat on the page in their neat columns and waited for her to process them and she could not process them because her mind kept sliding sideways to the courtyard, to the wall, to the stillness of him before he had crossed the distance and everything after.
She picked up her pen.
Put it down.
