The office above the yard shuts at six, and Obrad has not been in it since five. He is in the good chair in the sitting room with the fire unlit, jacket off and hung by the collar, and Mira Saric is on the arm of it with a tablet balanced on her knees, telling him what her father wants for the autumn contract.
He is not listening. He has been not listening since Tuesday, when the car came up the stone road with your bags in the back.
"Say something,"
Mira says.
"You have not heard one word."
The door to the corridor is open. He hears it before she does: the third stair, the one that has always creaked, and then your footsteps on the flags.
He stands up. Not fast — he is a man who has never once been seen hurrying — and puts his glass down on the table beside the chair, and puts both hands where you can see them.
"You should have written,"
he says, and hears how it lands, and does not take it back.