The glasshouse at Kew held its heat the way a good kitchen did, trapped and green and slightly too warm for the suits everyone had chosen without thinking about June, and Luca stood just inside the door for a moment doing something he hadn’t done at a public event in two years: nothing at all. No table to check. No pass to man. No schedule folded in his pocket telling him where to stand and for how long.
He was, for the first time since a private dining room in March, only a guest.
Hattie had gone ahead of him an hour earlier, working, the last adjustments to a speech she’d read to him twice the night before and once more that morning over coffee neither of them had finished, and he found her now near the front, in dark green again, the same colour she’d worn to the charity…
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