The Present Tense

Six weeks became eight. Eight became three months. Clara renewed the leave, and then she didn't need to anymore.

The empty space next to the bookshop turned out to be unsuitable for a law office on inspection — the plumbing was wrong and the natural light was all wrong — but the office above the ironmonger's on the high street had good light and solid floors and enough room for two desks and a client consultation area, and by July she had two local clients, which was nothing compared to a senior partnership caseload and everything compared to the nothing she'd been afraid of.

She didn't stop working for the London firm entirely. She did three days a month from the ironmonger's office, remote, the work that could be done by video call and careful documentation. Alcott had adapted, because Alcott was above all else a pragmatist, and she was above all else good at her job, and neither of those things required her to be in Paddington.

She and Marcus had dinner three times a week and sometimes four. He was reading aloud to her in the evenings — something she hadn't expected, something she found she needed the way she needed the morning coffee, the way she needed the grey scarf on cold days. They argued about books. She was always right about structure and he was always right about heart and they had established, over three months, a highly functional operating agreement on the subject.

He kissed her once on the doorstep of the bookshop in full view of half of Clement Street and she heard about it from her mother by evening.

She didn't mind.

She renewed the lease on her London flat, and then she didn't. She transferred the last of her boxes — not the careful six from May, but the real ones, the ones with her grandmother's china and the lamp she'd bought in Edinburgh and the photograph of her father — to the cottage she'd rented on the edge of town while she worked out if she wanted to buy.

She was working out if she wanted to buy.

She told Marcus this on an August evening on the porch of the cottage, both of them with glasses of the wine he'd been saving longer than the Burgundy, the long summer light going slow across the valley.

"You're thinking about buying," he said.

"I'm thinking about it."

"That's different from thinking about the empty space next to the bookshop."

"Yes." She turned the glass in her hands. "The empty space next to the bookshop was a hypothesis. This is a — more developed hypothesis."

He was quiet for a moment. The light moved.

"I want to say something," he said, "and I want to get the words right."

She waited.

"I didn't stay in Millhaven for you," he said. "I want to make sure you know that. I stayed because it's mine. Because the bookshop is mine and the porch steps on your mother's house are mine in a way that matters to me. And because I believe in the life I built here." He looked at her. "But you are — Clara, you are the thing that makes it make sense. Not the reason I'm here. The reason it all adds up."

She looked at the valley and the light and his careful hands around the glass.

She had written a letter at seventeen that said she hoped, someday, somewhere, she would be that for someone.

She had been carrying it in a drawer for sixteen years.

"I want to buy the cottage," she said.

"All right," he said.

"And I want to write you a letter," she said. "A real one. With a stamp. That actually gets sent."

He smiled. The real one.

"I've been waiting," he said, "for that letter."

She put her hand over his on the porch railing.

The valley held the last light for a long time.