I looked from Jarw (waiting) to Merida (building) to Vera’s words (defiant).
I had been staring at the same sentence for forty-five minutes: “The light through the stained glass fell on Vera’s notes like a question.” I couldn’t move past it. The words were right, but the feeling was wrong.
She built with the focus of a tiny architect. Each card placed at a perfect, trembling angle. She did not look at Jarw. She did not look at me. She looked only at the tower, as if it were the only honest thing in the room.
That, I thought, is either the definition of hope or the definition of madness. Perhaps they are the same thing. And then there was Vera .
Vera wasn't there. Not in body. But her notes were—scattered across my table, because I was supposed to be writing her biography. Vera had been a librarian here in the 1940s. She had hidden a collection of forbidden poetry inside the bindings of old agricultural reports. She had been fired for it. She had never apologized.
There are some Saturdays that feel like a sentence rather than a gift. This was one of them.
When it fell (it always falls), she did not cry. She simply began again.
Every sixty seconds, he would tap his ring—silver, worn thin—against the wooden arm of his chair. Tap. Then nothing. Tap. Then nothing.