The Wrong Word

On the Wednesday we worked late because we were behind. That is the whole of the reason, and I have gone back over it several times looking for a better one, and there is not one. We were on page two hundred and eighty-eight. We had forty-seven days and twenty-three pages and a second pass and a chapter that did not exist, and at nine in the evening neither of us had said the word home.

There was also an email in my coat, in the sense that a thing is in your coat when you have read it four times and answered nothing. The press in Madrid wanted me for three events in the second week of February with Ximena Belda, whose last four novels I have put into English and who will not do these things alone. I had not mentioned it to Elodie, on the grounds that…