He put his fork down.

“Two years, Stella.”

“I know.”

“Two years and four months and you’ve never asked me once.” He sat back. “I’ve been waiting for it. I want you to know that. I’ve had a version prepared since about the following spring.”

Harrison Duke has run his own security consultancy for six years and has a wife and a mortgage and eleven employees, and in the September in question he was thirty-four and building it.

He did not, it turns out, do anything as clean as I had assumed.