Ten Days

The ten days had a shape to them that Clara hadn't expected.

She'd imagined the remaining time in Millhaven as a closing-down — boxes finished, estate sorted, her efficient city-self sliding back into place. Instead it became something she didn't have a word for yet. Marcus opened the bookshop at nine. She started arriving at nine-fifteen, carrying two coffees from the café on the corner, and he would look up from the ledger and not say anything, and she would set one cup on the counter, and they would proceed.

She helped him catalog a donated box of estate books on the second afternoon. He sat on one side of the sorting table and she sat on the other and they argued about whether a foxed copy of a mid-century novel was worth keeping or pricing out. He said worth keeping. She said the foxing had gone into the spine. He said that was character. She said that was wishful thinking.

He laughed — the real one, not the careful one — and it caught her off guard in the same way it always had.

She was putting the novels back on the shelf when her phone rang. London number. Her managing partner, James Alcott, who never called unless something was wrong.

"Clara." His voice had the particular flatness he used for bad news. "The Meridian account. They've moved the presentation up. They want us in front of the whole board by Thursday."

Thursday was in five days. Millhaven was a seven-hour drive from London.

"I'll sort it," she said.

She hung up and stood with the foxed novel in her hand and looked at the dark-blue wall and thought about Thursday and the ten days and the careful way Marcus had said then I think we figure out what the present tense version says.

Marcus appeared at the end of the aisle. He read her face the way he'd always been able to.

"You have to go early," he said.

"Thursday."

He was quiet. Then he reached for the novel in her hand and shelved it — worth keeping, spine and all.

"I'll drive you to the station," he said.

"Marcus—"

"Come for dinner tonight," he said. "There are things I'd rather say over a meal."

She looked at him for a moment.

"What things?"

He met her eyes. "The ones I didn't put in the letters."

She said yes. She didn't tell him about the cold feeling that had settled behind her sternum — the one that felt less like anticipation and more like the gas station on Route 9, the engine running, the letter in her hand, the choice she'd made and unmade and lived with for eleven years.

She drove home and stood in her childhood bedroom and looked at her half-packed boxes and thought: I have done this before. I know exactly how this goes.