The investigation had structured our evenings.
This was something I only understood after it was over. During the seven weeks of intensive work, the evenings in the study had felt continuous with everything else — natural, inevitable, the obvious way for a day to end. It was only after the conclusion, when the files were put away and the immediate urgency had receded, that I noticed the shape the investigation had given to our time together. It had been, among other things, a framework. Something that organized proximity and gave it a name.
Now the framework was gone, and what remained was the proximity itself, unstructured.
