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We finished on the twentieth of March, which was a Thursday, and the deadline was the Monday, so we had four days in hand.

The five weeks before it went like this. We came back from Turin by way of a lunch in her mother’s kitchen involving peppers, at which I was asked twice whether I was eating and not once where I had been for three years. Chapter fourteen took eleven days, the slowest work either of us has done in twenty years. The second pass took the rest. Renzo sent eighty-one queries and was right about twenty-nine of them, his best rate of the project, and in the first week of March he commissioned Noor for the German, by email, with no preamble.

And in five weeks neither of us raised March. We agreed on the Sunday, on a train, that we would not decide anything until the…