It was five minutes past eleven. Once again she calculated the hours: though they’d all stayed up till three the night before, Zoltan had had a full night’s sleep, unlike Mack, who’d gotten up at six-thirty, or Heather herself, who’d been listening expectantly for the first flush of Zoltan’s toilet since she’d helped the children dress. But suppose she had miscalculated and he was at that very moment hard at work? Then her interruption would be a clear transgression. If he were still asleep, she had no right to wake him, even though she had picked up fresh cream and croissants in the village after dropping the children at their school. But she had to risk it. From the moment Zoltan’s lips had burned into her hand and his eyes had skewered her—no, even before that, from Mack’s announcement a month ago that Maja’s lover might come to live with them—she’d assumed he would become her lover, too. Not Maja but she would be the apex of this beguiling triangle. Reading Zoltan’s books in bed at night to prepare herself for his arrival, studying the impossibly complicated map of Eastern Europe she had clipped from the Times and used as a bookmark, she had imagined his face nuzzled between her breasts or thighs, seen his intense gaze twine with her own.
