"I told Mrs. Haverstock the weather looked promising this morning. I said the clouds were moving east. You are not, to my knowledge, responsible for the weather."
"No, but I was very confident about it. Which is worse." She sat down on the bench. "Confidence in uncertain things is a character flaw I am working on." She looked at the rain. "The work is slow."
Rafferty sat at the other end of the bench. Hegel positioned himself precisely between them and put his head on his front paws.
The rain was very loud on the roof. Inside it, there was a stillness—the kind that happens when two people are prevented from moving by something external and have to simply be where they are without the option of going somewhere else.
"Your father's journals," Rafferty said after a while, "do you read them sometimes?"
She turned the question over before she answered it, the way she turned pages carefully, with attention to what was underneath. "Not for information. Just for his voice. He wrote the way he talked, as though every subject was the most interesting one he had encountered, and he couldn't quite believe he was the one who got to think about it."
"I should like that," Rafferty said. He said it as a statement of fact, and then realized a half-second later that it might be taken as something else.
She looked at him. A small pause. Her eyes, he thought, were the precise color of amber glass with light behind it—not honey, exactly, but something slightly deeper. Something that changed with what she was looking at.
"I take that as considerable praise," she said.
"It was meant as an observation," he said, which was both true and inadequate.
"I know," she said, and then quietly, "Thank you."
The rain went on. Below them, the rose garden filled with water in the low places, and Hegel made a small sound in his sleep, and outside, someone called across the Haverstock lawn in the cheerful, carrying voice of a person who has found shelter and wants others to know it. Rafferty looked at the garden. Adelaide looked at the garden. Neither of them spoke for quite some time, and neither of them moved. And the rain did what rain sometimes does when it holds two people in the same place: it made the stillness mean something.