"I missed you," I said.
He went very still.
"We've been in the same penthouse for four months," he said.
"I know," I said. "I missed you anyway."
He held my gaze for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "Same."
We had dinner. Real dinner — two hours, unhurried, a conversation that was not about sleep schedules or governance frameworks or Edinburgh data or anything that existed outside this table. We talked about the things we had talked about at the kitchen island in the early weeks, before the governance crisis and the hearings and the baby, the things that were simply his and mine: the book he'd been reading in sections and had opinions about, the thing I'd been thinking about that had no operational relevance and was interesting anyway, the particular way the October contract had read f
