Chapter 1

She opens her eyes with the usual reluctance on hearing her name shouted up the stairway. Some query about papers connected with work. No reference to the day just beginning and the potential for joy it could bring, or even a notion that there once may have been some affection between that voice and her own. She answers with the same tone of reluctance, thinking that once their conversations were littered with reference to political leaders and poets, sometimes turning in a flash to raised voices and excited arguments. Now their arguments were purely of a domestic nature.

Rachel where are those papers I brought home last night?

In the desk where you left them.

Was this really where all those dreams had brought her? Struggling to force herself out of their bed not because he was drawing her back into it, but because what lay ahead held no attraction for her.

He has left the house now, gone to his other life of which she knows nothing. Only that some days are worse than others and that some days are longer than others.