I slept for three hours and forty minutes and woke up feeling better than I had any right
to feel on that amount of sleep.
There is a specific quality to the morning after you have finally said, or heard, the thing
that needed saying. The world looks the same. The hotel suite is the same. The New York
skyline through the window is doing its usual indifferent thing. But something has shifted
in the way you move through it, the way air moves differently after a storm has cleared,
not dramatic, just cleaner.
I made coffee. I made Ethan’s breakfast. He appeared at seven fifteen in his uniform and
looked at me and said: “You look different.”
“I look the same,” I said.
“You look like you didn’t sleep much,” he said. “But you’re not tired.” He accepted his
toast. “That’s a specific com
