~Mira~
The hand arrived at my knee in the middle of the soup.
Just a hand. Warm, dry and heavy, arriving under the white cloth like it had every right to be there. I sat up straighter and looked down the table and Saul was forty inches away at the head of it, passing the bread to Margot Henderson, not looking at me at all.
Alright, I thought. Alright.
He'd been at my knee for the whole of the first course before he moved. Up, slow, palm flat, over my thigh, and he stopped at the hem of my dress and waited there — just waited, thumb moving in a slow little arc against my skin — until I shifted my weight and opened my knees a fraction under the table.
Then he went up. The cloth was long enough. That's the thing about old houses and old people's dinner parties: the cloth is long, and the
