Thursday, four o'clock. I have the coffee on before the bell rings, because Robert is never late and I have become a woman who counts on that. Eleven months since the arrest. Eleven months of my husband's face in the papers and mine two inches below his. I am Sylvie, thirty-eight, and the neighbours across the road have stopped pretending not to look.
He comes in with the file under his arm, the way he always does. Grey suit, no tie today, rain on his shoulders that he brushes off in my hall as if he lives here. We sit at the dining table. He opens the file. He asks about the accounts, the dates, the signatures I never looked at closely.
Then he doesn't.
He closes the folder and puts both hands flat on the table and says, “How are you, Sylvie?” Not how are you holding up, not how is the case affecting you. How are you.
I don't have an answer prepared. Eleven months and no one has asked me that without a camera nearby. I open my mouth and what comes out is the truth, which is that I haven't been to a restaurant since February, that I have eaten every meal in this room, that I have started talking to the coffee machine.
He laughs, once, quietly, and then stops himself, because we both know what my husband's lawyer laughing in my dining room would look like from the street.
At half past five he should leave. He always leaves at half past five, and I have begun to time my week by it. Today he stays seated. The rain has stopped. The light through the curtain has gone the colour of weak tea, and Robert looks at the door, then at me, and asks, very carefully, whether I would like him to go.
