Evidence

Mare Street was damp, the pavement slick with the residue of recent rain, and the streetlights lay in the puddles in long, distorted ribbons that shivered whenever anything went past.

The café was easy to find. A neon sign in a faded shade of pink buzzed weakly above the door, casting a jittery glow over the storefront. Through the window the interior looked tired in a durable sort of way, linoleum worn down to grey, plastic booths that had seen better decades, a karaoke machine in the corner with the air of a dog that had been kicked before.

Cal stood outside for a moment.

Through the glass she could see him. Back booth, furthest from the door, a mug in front of him, looking down at something in his hands, not a book. A small folded piece of paper.

She watched him for a second longer than she needed to.

At Nocturne, Jax was never still. Even motionless he was working, reading the door, the room, the weather of forty strangers at once. She hadn’t understood she was seeing it until now, seeing its absence. Here he was just a man in a booth. Nobody needed him. Nothing was his to hold up.

He looked, she thought, about half a stone lighter.

The bell above the door chimed as she went in. He didn’t jump. He folded the paper, set it face down by the sugar shaker, and looked up.

“You found it.”

She glanced around: the neon, the linoleum, the man behind the counter scrolling his phone, one regular slumped over a laptop in the far corner.

“It wasn’t exactly hidden.”

“No.”

She slid into the booth across from him. The vinyl had cracked and been mended with tape, and the tape had cracked and been mended with newer tape, and there was something oddly reassuring about a place that fixed things by keeping them.

The waitress appeared, young, tired, kind about it.

“Tea,” said Jax, without looking at the menu.

Then he looked at Cal.

Not assuming. Just waiting.

“…Tea,” said Cal. “Please.”

The waitress left. Cal looked at the mug already in front of him, then at the laminated menu card boasting about the coffee in a font that had last been fashionable during a different government.

“I should tell you something,” she said. “In the spirit of full disclosure.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t actually like coffee.”

Jax nodded, unbothered, as though she’d told him the sky was overcast.

“Neither do I.”

Cal blinked.

Of course he didn’t.

“…Then why are we here?”

In the corner, a man who had been feeding coins into the karaoke machine cleared his throat into the microphone and began, with tremendous sincerity, to attempt Hallelujah.

He missed the third note.

Jax waited.

The fourth note went somewhere no note had ever intended to go.

Jax looked back at Cal.

“Evidence.”

Cal laughed, the proper kind, the kind that arrived without asking, and the man at the counter glanced up from his phone with the weary tolerance of someone who had watched people fall for this exact bit before.

“You said the karaoke was terrible,” she said. “You didn’t say it was structural.”

“It’s the main attraction.” He turned his mug a quarter-turn. “The coffee’s just there to keep the licence.”

The teas arrived. Hers was strong and orange and served in a mug with a hairline crack that had been coming along nicely for years. It was, she had to admit, better than it had any right to be.

The singer committed to the chorus the way people commit to bad marriages.

They sat in it together, the noise and the neon, and Cal realised the silence between them had changed key. At Nocturne their silences were full, weighted, working. This one was just comfortable. A silence with its shoes off.

She was still deciding what to do with that when Jax spoke.

“What was the second book?”

Cal blinked.

“Sorry?”

“You finished the first optimism purchase.” He said it the way he said everything, flat, accurate, unhurried. “At speed. Mild personal cost.” A pause. “You said there were three.”

She stared at him.

“You remember that?”

“You said it.”

As though that settled it. As though the two things, you said it and I remember it, were not separated by any distance at all. She thought of the notebook. Everything I can’t afford to forget. She wondered, briefly and dangerously, what category she’d been filed under, and put the wondering where she put things.

“The second one,” she said, “is about a lighthouse keeper who may or may not be dead, and the woman on the mainland who keeps writing to him anyway. It’s not clear, whether he’s dead, I mean. I think that’s deliberate. The sentences are like cold water, I mean that as a compliment. It’s very good and extremely annoying.”

“Annoying how?”

“It keeps almost telling you. It gets right up to the edge of telling you and then it, goes and describes the sea for four pages.”

“And you keep reading.”

“Of course I keep reading.”

“Then it’s not annoying.” He drank his tea. “It’s working.”

Cal opened her mouth to argue and found, irritatingly, that she had no argument, and settled for narrowing her eyes at him, which he received with the placid immunity of a man who had been glared at by professionals.

And then something happened that she almost missed, because it was so quiet.

He asked another question.

“Does she know?”

“Does who know what?”

“The woman. Whether he’s dead.”

“The book doesn’t say.”

“That’s not what I asked.” A small pause. “The book keeping it from you, that’s the book’s business. Whether she knows is hers.” He turned his mug another quarter-turn. “Does she write like a woman who knows, or a woman who doesn’t?”

A beat.

“They’re different books.”

Cal sat back.

Because this was the thing, and it had taken her until now, in a tired café on Mare Street with a man dismantling Hallelujah in the background, to see it:

She had spent three visits asking Jax questions.

Tonight, Jax was asking her.

Not politely. Not taking his turn. He wanted to know, she could see it, the same stillness in his eyes she’d seen when she asked about the shelves, the look of a man actually considering, except pointed outward now, at her, at a lighthouse keeper who may or may not be dead.

The curiosity was running in both directions.

She could have wept, or laughed, or said something enormous. Instead she said:

“I think the book knows. I think it’s protecting her.”

“From the answer?”

“From having to stop hoping.”

Jax considered that for a long moment. The karaoke man finished, to scattered and largely ironic applause, and was replaced by a woman who intended to do things to I Will Survive that Gloria Gaynor had specifically not authorised.

“Protecting someone from an answer,” Jax said at last. “That ever work?”

“…In books?”

“In general.”

Cal looked at her tea.

The mug was warm under her hands. The crack in it had been coming along nicely for years, and the café had kept it anyway, and somewhere under the neon a woman was surviving at tremendous volume, and the question sat on the table between them, folded, face down, next to his piece of paper, being about a lighthouse keeper.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think it ever does.”

“No,” Jax agreed. “But people keep trying.”

He said it without weight, an observation about the species, filed and released, and moved on, and asked her what the third book was about, and she told him she didn’t know because it was still sitting on the side table being patient, and he said books were good at that, better than people, and the evening carried on the way evenings do when nobody is performing.

They talked about nothing that would survive summary. The waitress refilled the teas once without being asked. At some point Cal noticed she had finished an entire mug while it was still hot, which had not happened in living memory, and she decided not to mention it to anyone, ever, least of all Grigori.

The folded paper stayed by the sugar shaker all evening, face down.

She never asked.

He never explained.

When they left, it went into his inside pocket, where it lived, she supposed, with the pen, and whatever else that jacket had quietly decided to keep.

Outside, the rain had finished and the street had that rinsed, five-past-midnight look, all its colours down to grey and pink neon.

They stood for a moment on the pavement, in the temporary country that exists outside a café after closing time.

“The coffee’s still passable on Thursdays,” said Jax.

Cal looked at him.

“Is that an invitation?”

“You’ll infer it,” said Jax.

And he turned up his collar and walked off towards Nocturne, unhurried, a man with keys in his pocket and a club to hold up, and Cal stood under the pink neon and watched him to the corner, and past it.

Then she walked home the other way, along the sleeping street, doing sums.

Thursday was six days away.

She was not counting.

She counted twice more before the bridge.