Becoming Us Part 1

The following morning, Ernest Teucher discovered that falling in love carried an unexpected, deeply disruptive side effect.

It made him impatient.

Not with his foundry foremen, nor with the coal suppliers, nor with the stubborn clerks at the Ministry of Commerce. Those remained precisely as irritating as they had always been.

His impatience was focused entirely on Thursday. Specifically, three o'clock on Thursday afternoon.

Ernest sat at his mahogany desk, scowling at the brass desktop calendar. It was ten past nine on Monday morning. Three entire days—seventy-two agonizing hours of operational meetings, tariff disputes, and boiler inspections—stood between him and the hospital solarium.

He tapped his pen against the blotter, briefly considering whether there was any justifiable commercial pretext to call at the Valemont townhouse before then. There was none.