Chapter 37: The Public War
The penthouse in the morning was different from the penthouse at night.
She had known it at night — the city blazing beyond the windows, the single lamp, the particular dark of a space that existed at the top of everything and answered to nothing below it. She knew the night version intimately now. The way the light fell. The way the city hummed against the glass.
The morning version was something else.
Light came through the floor to ceiling windows without asking — the particular pale gold of a Milan morning in early spring, unhurried and thorough, filling the penthouse with the kind of clarity that made everything look exactly like what it was. No shadows to soften edges. No darkness to make ambiguity comfortable.
She lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling and let the morning be what it was.
He was already awake.
