The morning after the Sunday breakfast Maya stays.
Not because anything requires it. Because the house after everyone leaves has a specific quality — the settling-back-to-itself quality, the rooms adjusting to the smaller number — and Maya has learned over ten years of Sundays that the morning after is sometimes better than the Sunday itself. Quieter. More honest.
She's in the reading nook she claimed at the farmhouse years ago. Not her apartment nook — the farmhouse has its own, a window seat in the study that nobody decided was hers but that became hers through the consistency of her being in it when she was here.
Daniel has gone back to Missoula. Monday patients. The specific discipline of a cardiologist who has built his schedule around both the work and the unallocated hours and treats the boundary between them with the same precision he brings to everything now.
She has her coffee. The Monday morning.
Aria comes in at eight.
"You stayed," Aria says.
