The Return

Cal was not going back to Nocturne.

This had been established. Filed. Closed. She had said it out loud, to Grigori, in a room that never argued, and saying things out loud made them true, that was simply how it worked.

So when she went out on the fourth day, it was for entirely unrelated reasons. She needed the walk. The flat was stuffy. There were errands, probably, if she thought hard enough, and the long way happened to go south, past the canal, and the canal happened to lead in a particular direction, and none of this meant anything, because she was not going back to Nocturne.

She stopped two streets short of it.

Which proved, she felt, a great deal.

There was a bookshop on the corner, closed, its window full of handwritten cards, and beside it an antique shop she had walked past a hundred times without ever going in.

She went in.

The shop was narrow and deep, and it smelled of dust and beeswax and time holding its breath. Every shelf was full. Clocks that had stopped at hours nobody remembered. Teacups from services long since scattered. Boxes, cases, cabinets, things inside things, wrapped and kept and saved.

Everything in it had belonged to someone.

Everything in it was being looked after.

Cal moved down the aisle slowly, and felt, she noticed this without pursuing it, more at ease than she had felt in any room with people in it for some weeks.

She wasn’t looking for anything.

She found the mirror first.

Small. Oval. A frame of dark wood worn smooth at the edges by generations of hands. She picked it up and her own face looked back at her and it was, disconcertingly, her actual face. Old glass. It didn’t soften anything. It didn’t flatter. It simply reported.

Honest, she thought.

He’d like that.

The thought arrived before she could stop it, complete and specific and wearing its intentions openly, and she put it down, the thought, not the mirror. The mirror stayed in her hand.

It wasn’t for anyone. She just liked it.

The pen was in a case near the till. Black resin, gold nib, the barrel gently worn where a hand had held it, years of it, decades maybe. A pen that had helped someone think. A pen that had run out of someone to help.

Everything I can’t afford to forget, said a low voice in her memory, resting its hand near a notebook.

She wasn’t buying the pen for anyone either.

The key she found last, in a bowl of keys by the window, the way you find the one thing in a room that was waiting for you. Brass, gone dark, the teeth worn soft, the bow polished by a century of pockets.

“No lock for that one, I’m afraid,” said the man behind the till. He was elderly and unhurried and had the air of a person who had wrapped a great many strange decisions in brown paper without comment. “Just the key.”

“That’s all right,” said Cal. “It doesn’t need one.”

He nodded, as though this were a normal thing to say, and began to wrap them, the mirror, the pen, the key, in brown paper and string, small, smaller, smallest.

“Things like these,” he said mildly, tying the last knot, “want using, mind. Not keeping.”

“Yes,” said Cal, who was not listening, because she was busy completing a thought that had been assembling itself, quietly, since the mirror.

It would be kind.

That was all this was. He had answered her questions honestly, and asked for nothing, and a person could simply give another person a gift. People did it constantly. It was called kindness, and kindness was something she was doing, as opposed to anything else it might have been.

She paid, and stepped out into the street, and turned, without any deliberation at all, which was rather the point, towards Nocturne.

She was, after all, already in the area.

Jax looked at the three parcels on his desk for a while before he touched them.

Cal stood on the other side of the desk, having refused the chair, holding her own hands.

“They’re not dangerous,” she said.

“I know.” He didn’t look up. “I’d have noticed.”

He opened them the way he did everything — without hurry, string untied rather than snapped, paper folded back rather than torn. The mirror. The pen. The key. He set each one down in a row and looked at them, and the lamp hummed, and downstairs the bass went on keeping its patient time.

“Why?”

Just that.

Cal had prepared several answers on the walk over. They had all been excellent. They were all, she discovered, unavailable.

“You answered my questions,” she said. “Honestly. You didn’t have to.”

“That’s payment, then.”

“No”

“Because I don’t take payment for that.”

“It’s not payment.” She heard her voice come out too quickly and moderated it. “They’re gifts. They looked like they belonged to someone. I thought they might as well belong to you.”

It was true.

It was so nearly the whole truth that she almost believed it herself.

Jax picked up the pen first. Weighed it. Turned it once between his fingers, the way he’d turned his glass, and she watched his thumb find the worn place on the barrel, find it immediately, without searching, and made her face very still.

He set it down.

He picked up the key.

“What does it open?”

“Nothing,” said Cal. “There’s no lock. Just the key.”

Jax looked at it for a long moment. A key to nothing, dark with age, worn smooth by hands.

“Hm,” he said, and set it down too.

The mirror he turned over once, glass side down, and left that way, and did not comment on at all.

Then he looked at her. Properly. Cover to cover, and this time it took longer, as though the book had grown new pages since the last reading.

“You didn’t ask me what I wanted.”

It wasn’t an accusation. That was the worst part. It was an observation, laid down flat, like a card, the same voice he’d used to tell her she was leaving because she was right.

“I…” Cal stopped. Rallied. “People don’t, with gifts. That’s what makes them gifts. If you ask, it’s just shopping.”

“That’s a nice sentence,” said Jax.

Silence.

“It’s true,” she said.

“It’s tidy,” he said. “They’re not always the same thing.”

He leaned back. The chair creaked. His eyes went along the row on the desk, mirror, pen, key, and back to her, and something in his expression was almost amused, and almost wasn’t.

“Don’t go thinking you’ve figured me out because you bought me a pen.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Good,” said Jax. He said it mildly. He picked the pen back up anyway, she noticed that; she filed it in the place where she filed everything, and opened the drawer, and put it away. “Because people who buy for me before they ask me are usually building something. And I like to see the plans.”

“There are no plans.”

Jax looked at her.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t call it a lie, because it wasn’t one, quite, she believed it, and he could evidently see that she believed it, and he let the silence do what his silences did, which was hold a thing up to the light without fingerprinting it.

“Thank you for the gifts,” he said at last, and it was courteous and it was final, and the meeting was over in the way weather is over.

At the door she stopped. She didn’t know why. There was something else, and it didn’t have words yet, and she stood in the doorway of his office with the bass coming up through her shoes not saying it.

“They really did look like yours,” she said.

Which was the truest thing she’d said all evening, and safely meaningless, and Jax nodded once, and she left.

Home dissolved quietly.

The Empty Room didn’t replace it.

It simply… was.

Cal sat with her tea and did not drink it, and eventually said, to the smooth, unbroken walls:

“…You can come in.”

Grigori arrived with his coat and his books and one raised eyebrow, which on Grigori constituted a full interrogation.

“Twice in one week,” he said, sitting. “I’ll start expecting furniture.”

“I went back.”

“I know.”

“You can’t possibly know.”

“You’ve the look of a woman who’s been told something accurate,” said Grigori, opening his book. “It’s very distinctive.”

She glared. He read.

“He said…” She stopped. Rearranged it. “He implied I was building something.”

“Mm.”

“I’m not building anything.”

“Of course not.”

“I was being kind.”

“Mm,” said Grigori, and turned a page, and let the word sit there between them with its shoes off, entirely at home.

They drank their tea. The room did nothing, generously. Cal talked about other things, the shop, the weather, a book she was thinking of starting, and Grigori listened, or read, or both, which with Grigori were not exclusive activities.

Eventually he gathered his books and stood.

“I should go.”

She nodded. “So should I.”

He crossed to the place where the door would have been, or where she’d decided it was, and stopped.

Without looking back:

“What did you take him?”

“The gifts?”

A nod.

“A mirror.”

Another.

“A fountain pen.”

He waited.

“And… a brass key.”

He smiled. Small. Thoughtful.

“They sound like good gifts.”

Cal relaxed.

“I thought so.”

A pause.

Then:

“Did he ask for them?”

The words landed softly. Almost casually. The way his questions always did, right before they didn’t.

Cal frowned.

“No.”

“He didn’t.”

Grigori nodded once.

“I didn’t think he would.”

She folded her arms.

“I was only trying to be kind.”

“I know.”

Nothing else. No lecture. No disappointment. Just I know, in the voice of a man who knew a great many things and had learned which of them to carry silently.

He reached the door that wasn’t there.

Then, without turning around:

“He’s always preferred choosing his own books.”

Cal frowned.

“What does that mean?”

A tiny shrug.

“If I tell you.” The corner of his mouth lifted, “you’ll only accuse me of ruining the ending.”

And he was gone.

Cal sat alone. The room hadn’t changed. It never did.

She looked down at her mug.

“…That was annoyingly unhelpful.”

The Empty Room, as always, offered no opinion.

She sat a while longer, in the colourless quiet, among the smooth, unbroken walls and everything she told herself they weren’t.

“I was only trying to be kind,” she said again to nobody.

And for the first time, she didn’t sound entirely convinced.