Return

She arrived on a Tuesday, which was not the day Marcus had been expecting her.

He'd thought Friday. She'd texted from the motorway when she was an hour out — coming early, is that all right — and he'd responded with: the door is unlocked. Nothing else. She'd laughed, alone in the car, at how completely that was him.

She drove down the valley road with the window cracked and the early May air coming in cold and clean, and when the steeple appeared through the trees her throat didn't tighten this time. It felt like something different: arrival rather than return.

She parked outside the bookshop. It was ten past nine and the lights were on.

He was behind the counter, as he always was. He looked up when the door opened.

He didn't say anything for a moment. He came around the counter, which was four steps, and he stopped in front of her, and she said, "I know I'm three days early."

"I know," he said.

"I have six boxes in the car."

Something changed in his face. Not surprise. Recognition again — the same recognition as that first morning with the letter.

"Six boxes," he said.

"Books and winter clothes. And the scarf, obviously." She held his eyes. "I'm not making a permanent decision today. I'm making a provisional decision. I have a flat in London I haven't given notice on. I have a job that's agreed to reassess in six weeks. I have a list of variables that I am — in my professional estimation — significantly underweighted on."

"And yet," he said.

"And yet." She paused. "I was looking at cottages to rent and I closed the tab and looked up something else. I kept thinking about what you said — that you could be here for six months. And I thought: I want to be here too. For the six months. And see."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"What were you looking at?" he said. "Instead of the cottages."

She reached into her bag and pulled out a printout — folded twice, a property listing.

"The space next to your bookshop," she said. "The one that's been empty since January."

He took the printout. He looked at it. He looked at her.

"You're thinking of opening a practice here," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm thinking about what it would mean to," she said. "I'm not past the thinking stage. I wanted to do the thinking here, in the actual place, with you in proximity." She paused. "Is that too much?"

He set the printout on the counter. He crossed his arms, not in the closed way but in the thinking way, the one she recognized from seventeen years old across a library table.

"No," he said. "It's not too much."

"I want to be honest about what this is," she said. "I'm not here because I've decided. I'm here because I need to be in the place where the decision makes sense. Everything looks different from London."

He nodded slowly.

"What does it look like from here?" he said.

She looked around the bookshop — the shelves, the dark-blue wall, the amber lamp, the handwritten cards she'd been reading for eleven years without knowing it.

"Like something worth building," she said.

He uncrossed his arms. He came around the counter again — this time all the way, past the sorting table, to where she was standing.

"Let me help you with the boxes," he said.

She followed him to the door. Outside on Clement Street the morning was bright and cold, the maple trees just beginning to leaf. He lifted the first box from the boot of her car without ceremony, as if this were a thing they had been doing all along.

She lifted the second.

They carried them inside.