Three Days to Exile

VANCE’S POV

I go to Vera after breakfast, which is to say after one cup of coffee and most of a second, because I put it off exactly as long as I can justify and not one minute longer.

She’s in the small sitting room she’s colonised over the years, the warm one in the east wing with her grandmother’s things crowding every shelf and the permanent smell of dried herbs hanging in the air.

She’s at th