Chapter 13: Edmund Surfaces

The loop begins at quarter past six and the woman is still there.

This is not how it goes. Edmund knows, with the certainty of something worn smooth by repetition, how it goes: the light through the sitting room window goes amber at four, blue-grey at five, and then dark, and at six-thirteen the footsteps stop on the landing outside and do not resume, and he waits, and the waiting is the whole of it, the entire substance of the hours. The loop does not contain a woman at quarter past six. It does not contain a woman in a dark coat crouched on her heels in the corridor, writing in a notebook with her left hand, her wrist cocked at an angle he recognises the way he recognises the pitch of the boiler's complaint — not as something he has learned but as something that preceded learning.

He stands in the doorway of his room and watches her.