Noor's Diagnosis

I want to be accurate about the order in which Noor Kassab took us apart, because the order was not an accident. She has been doing this to me since we were twenty-eight, and she always starts with the small thing.

She came on the twelfth of December, on the six o’clock from Berlin, into a city that had been dark since half past three. We were on page one hundred and ninety-six of three hundred and eleven. We had four working weeks behind us since Turin and we had settled every reading in chapters four and five, and I had begun, privately, in the part of my head where I keep schedules, to believe we would hand the thing in a fortnight early.

She was coming to the study on the Friday at half past ten. At nine that Friday morning, over the second coffee, I gave Elodie my…