Milk

Cal woke at 10:47.

This was entirely the fault of the book.

The book had promised, somewhere around chapter nineteen, that it was nearly finished.

The book had lied.

She’d checked the clock at two in the morning and thought, one more chapter, in the way people think one more breath.

Now the flat was full of the wrong kind of light. The accusatory kind. The kind that knew exactly what time it was and wanted her to know it too.

She put the kettle on.

Made tea.

Carried it to the window.

Set it down.

The three books were still on the side table. She’d bought them months ago, in a fit of optimism, and they had sat there ever since, patient as furniture.

She picked up the top one.

Read half a page.

It was good. It was actually good, clean sentences, cold water sentences, and she was absolutely going to keep reading it, just as soon as she’d checked whether the noise outside was the neighbour’s cat or the fox.

It was a carrier bag caught on the railing.

She watched it anyway. It had a certain dignity.

When she came back, the book had closed itself.

She took this personally.

The tea on the windowsill had gone cold.

She didn’t notice at all.

She made another.

Drank almost a third of it, which by her standards was a triumph roughly on the order of a moon landing.

On the fridge, in her own handwriting:

MILK. ACTUALLY THIS TIME.

Right, she thought.

Milk.

Nocturne, in daylight, was a different animal.

No bass. No neon bleeding up the stairwell. Just the building itself, old wood, old smoke, the smell of cedar settling back into the walls now that no one was there to stir it.

Jax sat at his desk.

Working.

Not talking. There was no one to talk to, and he wouldn’t have anyway.

The notebook lay open in front of him. Names. Numbers. The small arithmetic of keeping a place like this standing.

He reached into his jacket for something to write with.

His fingers found the pen.

The black one. Gold nib.

He paused.

The pen lived in the drawer. He’d put it in the drawer. He was a man who knew where his things were, it was possibly his only unbroken rule, and the pen lived in the drawer.

It was in his inside pocket.

He didn’t remember putting it there.

He looked at it for a moment, turning it once between his fingers. It was comfortable. Used. The kind of weight that had spent years helping someone think.

He uncapped it.

Went back to work.

She took the long way to the shop, because the long way went past the canal and the short way went past the gym, and she didn’t need that sort of judgement today.

By the bridge, a man was holding his phone the way tourists hold phones. Like it had personally betrayed him.

He was looking for a museum she was fairly sure closed on Tuesdays.

It was a Tuesday.

She redirected him, gently, the way you redirect a river, towards the market instead, drawing the route in the air with her whole arm.

He thanked her twice.

She said no worries three times.

That was the exchange rate. Everyone knew that.

Forty feet later, there was a dog.

She didn’t decide to stop. That was the thing. Her body simply executed the sequence, stop, crouch, hello you, without consulting her at all, and the dog, a small scruffy diplomat of a thing, accepted the tribute as no more than its due.

“He’s called Biscuit,” said the owner.

“Of course he is,” she said, with feeling.

The sun came out over the water for about ninety seconds. Just long enough for everyone on the towpath to look up, as though they’d heard their name.

She walked home thinking about chapter nineteen.

There had been clues. She was almost sure there had been clues. If she went back and reread the scene at the harbour.

She half-ran the last stretch. Up the stairs. Key. Door. Book. Sofa.

She was three pages into rereading when she noticed her hands were empty in a very specific way.

She looked towards the kitchen.

The list on the fridge looked back.

MILK. ACTUALLY THIS TIME.

“…Oh, come on.”

She laughed.

Properly laughed. Alone, on her sofa, at four in the afternoon, with two cold teas in two different rooms and no milk in the house at all.

Jax locked up late.

He stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, thumb moving over them by habit. Door. Cellar. Office. Van.

And the brass one.

He stopped.

The brass key sat on the ring between the ordinary keys, worn smooth around the bow, looking for all the world as though it had been there for years.

It hadn’t.

It had been in the desk. Top right. He remembered putting it in the desk, and he did not remember taking it out, and he certainly did not remember threading it onto the ring, which was a thing that took effort, took a thumbnail and thirty seconds of mild swearing.

He looked at it.

A key to nothing. She’d known that when she gave it to him. He’d known it when he kept it.

He should take it off.

He put the keys in his pocket.

Behind him, on the desk, the mirror sat where it had sat since that night. He didn’t cover it. He wasn’t superstitious.

He just kept it turned around.

Glass to the wall.

The way you’d seat a guest you hadn’t decided about yet.

He looked at the back of it for a moment.

Then he turned off the lamp, and went down through his quiet club, past the bar and the stacked chairs and the shadows sitting patiently in the corners like tired dogs, and out into the London rain.

The pen rode home in his jacket.

The key rode home among the ordinary ones.

If you’d asked him why, he’d have told you the truth, because he always told the truth.

He’d have said he didn’t know.