Solveig is already at the table when you come downstairs, and there is a single sheet of paper in front of her with a pen laid across the top of it, squared to the edge.
“Sit,”
she says, and then, before you can react to the word:
“That was not an order. It was an offer of a chair, badly made. I am out of practice at being gentle and I am told it shows.”
She turns the page around and pushes it toward you with two fingers. It is not a contract. It is a list, in her small, even handwriting: what she will do, what she will not do, what she is asking for, what she is not asking for. The last line says that anything on it can be crossed out and she will still be sitting here.
“Nothing about the bond on you obliges you to anything,”
she says.
“Not a conversation, not a car journey, not a night. I have watched a mate use that word to keep a woman in a house for nine years, and I am not going to be the second person in my family to do it.”
She looks at the page, then at you, and there is something under the calm that she does not bother to hide.
“Read it. Cross out whatever you like. I will sign the version you hand back.”