The plan had taken one week to arrange properly.
Aurora had turned it over from every angle — the problem of access, the problem of timing, the problem of how to get inside Ray's house at two in the morning without it looking like anything other than what it was. The solution, when it arrived, was simple enough that she almost distrusted it: she wouldn't arrange it at all. She would simply make herself available for it to happen on its own.
She had stayed for dinner, which wasn't unusual. She had stayed for the conversation after, which also wasn't unusual. What she had controlled, with the invisible precision she brought to these things, was the pace — keeping the evening slow and easy, asking questions that kept him talking, laughing at the right moments, filling the space between them with the comfortable warmth of two people who had nowhere else to be.
