The ring was in the drawer with the batteries.
Stacy found it on a Tuesday, three weeks and two days after Mark had sat on the edge of their bed, looked at a point just above her left shoulder, and said, I don't think I'm the man who marries you. She had been looking for tape. Instead she found a small velvet box wedged between a pack of AAs and the takeaway menus they never used anymore, and she stood in the kitchen of the flat she had to leave by the end of the month and held it like something that might still be warm.
She didn't open it. She knew what was inside. She had worn it for fourteen months, and then she had taken it off and put it on the bedside table, and at some point Mark must have put it here, in the junk drawer, which felt like the most honest thing he had done in a year.
She put the box back. She found the tape in the bathroom cabinet, which made no sense, and she taped up a box labelled BOOKS (MINE), and then she sat on the floor and did not cry, because she had a twelve-hour shift in the morning and crying made her eyes swell like she'd lost a fight.
Ward 7 smelled of hand sanitiser and toast. It always did at seven in the morning, when the breakfast trolley came round and the night staff handed over with the glassy, over-careful voices of people who had been awake too long.
"Bed four had a rough night," said Priya, pulling off her gloves. "Mrs Arbuthnot. She thinks it's 1987 and she's missed her bus."
"Did she say where the bus was going?"
"Largs."
"Then she's got good taste." Stacy took the handover sheet and scanned it. Two discharges, one new admission from A&E, Mr Delaney in bed nine still refusing his physio.
"Speaking of," said Priya, and tilted her head towards the corridor with a look that meant nothing, which of course meant something.
Dan Keane came onto the ward the way weather comes into a room when someone opens a door. He was a physiotherapist, technically, although Stacy had heard him described as "a problem" by at least two of the senior sisters and as "the reason I finally started going to the gym" by a junior doctor who should have known better. He was tall and broad through the shoulders, with a nose that had clearly been broken once and not set with any enthusiasm, forearms that belonged on a rowing poster, and a tattoo on the inside of his wrist that he refused to explain to anyone.
He was loud. He rode a motorbike to work in every kind of weather and carried his helmet under his arm like a trophy. He called the patients boss and chief and my darling, depending, and somehow none of them minded. He had, according to hospital legend, dated half of Radiology.
He was, in every way that mattered, not Stacy's type.
"Morning, Nurse Whitlock," he said.
"Morning, Dan."
"Mr Delaney still hate me?"
"With his whole heart."
"Brilliant. I love a challenge." He leaned his forearms on the nurses' station, and the station, to its credit, did not collapse. "You look tired."
"Thank you. That's exactly what every woman wants to hear at seven a.m."
"I didn't say bad. I said tired." He studied her for a second longer than was comfortable, and she was aware, suddenly and irritatingly, of the fact that she hadn't put any mascara on. "You all right?"
It was the kind of question people asked while already walking away. He wasn't walking away.
"Moving house," she said. "It's fine."
"Need a hand? I've got a mate with a van."
"Of course you do."
"I've got mates with lots of things. It's my best quality." He straightened up and knocked twice on the counter, a habit of his. "Offer stands, Whitlock."
She watched him go down the corridor towards bed nine and heard Mr Delaney's voice rise in outrage and Dan's voice rise to meet it, cheerful as a brass band, and she went back to the handover sheet and read the same line four times.
Priya, pulling on her coat, said nothing at all, very loudly.
For five years, Stacy had not thought about Dan Keane. That was not to say she hadn't noticed him. You could not work on the same floor as a man like that and fail to notice him, the way you could not fail to notice a fire alarm. But noticing was a thing you did from behind glass. She'd had Mark. Mark was solid and sensible, and wore navy jumpers, and remembered her mother's birthday, and had a five-year plan with a spreadsheet attached. When other nurses sighed over Dan in the staff room, Stacy had rolled her eyes along with the rest of them and thought, with a small smugness she wasn't proud of now, Imagine actually being with someone like that. Exhausting.
She thought about it on the bus home, forehead against the window, the city sliding past in shades of wet grey. She thought about it in a way she hadn't allowed herself to, and then stopped, because it was ridiculous, and because the bus had missed her stop, and because her phone was buzzing.
THE SUNDAY TABLE 🍳
Emylia: Friday. Your flat. We are bringing wine, noodles, and bubble wrap. This is not a question.
Sata: I'm bringing the good tape. Not whatever you've been using.
Stacy: How do you know what tape I've been using
Sata: Because I know you, and I know it's the kind that doesn't stick to anything.
Emylia: Also Stace. We're not talking about Mark unless you want to. We are talking about literally anything else. I have a man-at-a-wine-bar story that will make you feel better about everything.
Stacy: ok ❤️
Emylia: That's the saddest ok I've ever seen. Friday. 7. Wear something you don't mind getting noodle on.
They arrived at quarter past seven, because Emylia was never on time and Sata never saw the point of arriving before Emylia. Emylia came in first, all dark curls and a red coat and three bottles of wine clinking in a canvas bag, talking before the door was fully open. Sata came behind her, cool and quiet in a black jumper, a camera around her neck the way other people wore scarves, carrying two rolls of tape and the takeaway.
"Oh, babe," said Emylia, taking in the living room, the boxes, the bare patches on the walls where the pictures had been. "It looks like a crime scene. A tidy crime scene. A crime scene by IKEA."
"Thank you."
"No, I mean it supportively."
Sata said nothing. She hugged Stacy, which she didn't do often, and held on for a count of three, which she did even less. Then she let go, looked at the box labelled BOOKS (MINE), pressed her thumb against the tape, and watched it peel up at the corner.
"See," she said.
They ate on the floor because the table had been Mark's. They drank the first bottle of wine out of mugs because the glasses had been a wedding-list gift from Mark's aunt, bought in anticipation of a wedding that was no longer going to happen, and it felt wrong to use them. Emylia told the wine bar story, which involved a man who claimed to be a sommelier and turned out to be a man who had once met a sommelier, and Stacy laughed so hard she got noodle up her nose.
By the second bottle they had moved on to the proper glasses anyway. "They're glasses," Sata said, pouring. "They didn't do anything wrong."
By the third, the packing had stopped entirely and they were lying on the living room floor in a row, heads together, looking at the ceiling with the one crack shaped like Italy that Stacy had stared at through five winters.
"Okay," said Emylia. "Game."
"No," said Sata.
"You don't even know what the game is."
"I know it's going to be the one where you ask personal questions and I have to answer them."
"It's called friendship, Sata." Emylia rolled onto her stomach. "Rules. We each have to say one thing we've never said out loud to the other two. Doesn't have to be dramatic. Just true."
"Mine's that I've always hated your red coat," said Sata.
"That's a lie, you've borrowed it four times."
"I've borrowed it in order to understand it."
Emylia threw a cushion at her. Then she looked at Stacy, and her voice changed slightly, softened at the edges. "Stace?"
And maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the ceiling, and the boxes, and the ring in the drawer ten feet away in the kitchen. Maybe it was that she had spent seven years being careful about what she said out loud, in case it changed something, and now everything had changed anyway, so what exactly was she protecting?
"There's this guy at work," she said.
The silence that followed had a very particular quality. It was the silence of two women who had known her since she was nineteen, both sitting up at exactly the same time.
"I'm sorry," said Emylia, "what?"
"It's nothing. It's not a thing."
"There's a guy," said Sata, slowly, as though translating from another language. "At work."
"He's a physio. Dan. He's—" Stacy put her hands over her face. "He's so not my type. He's loud. He rides a motorbike. He calls old men chief. He's apparently slept with most of Radiology, which I know is probably an exaggeration, but also it's Radiology, it's not a big department."
"Stacy Whitlock," said Emylia, in the voice of a woman seeing the sun rise for the first time. "Do you fancy someone?"
"No. Maybe. I don't know." She took her hands away from her face. The ceiling was still there. Italy was still there. "I've never — I was with Mark. I never let myself even think about it. It wasn't allowed. And now it's like someone opened a window I didn't know was there and I can't stop looking out of it."
"What does he look like?" said Sata.
"Why does that matter?"
"Because I'm a photographer and I'm building a picture."
Stacy considered it. "Like he was designed to carry a sofa up four flights of stairs and wouldn't even be out of breath at the top. He's got these forearms. And his nose has been broken. And he looks at you like he's actually — like he's actually listening, which is annoying, because I've decided he's shallow, and shallow people aren't supposed to listen."
Emylia made a small noise, somewhere between a whimper and a war cry.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I need to say something and I need you to not interrupt."
"You've never not been interrupted in your life."
"Sata." Emylia sat up fully and took Stacy's hand, the way she did when she was about to give advice that she would later insist she'd never given. "Stace. I love you. You are the most thoughtful person I know. You think about everything. You thought about your wedding flowers for eight months. You think about whether the bus driver is having a good day."
"That's just being a decent person."
"It's exhausting, is what it is. And look where all that thinking got you. You did everything right, and a man in a navy jumper still sat on the end of the bed and broke your heart." Emylia squeezed her hand. "So here's what I think. Next time this Dan says something to you, next time he offers you anything, a coffee, a lift, a hand with your boxes, whatever — you don't think. Not once. You just say yes."
"Emylia, I've been single for three weeks."
"Exactly. So this isn't a relationship. It can't be. You've already told us he's not your type for that. So don't make it one." Emylia's eyes glittered. "Make it a Tuesday."
"What does that mean?"
"It means something that doesn't have to mean anything."
Stacy turned to Sata, who was always the voice of reason, who took forty minutes to choose a lens and six months to agree to a second date. "Tell her she's mad."
Sata was quiet for a moment. She was turning her wine glass slowly by the stem.
"I don't think she's mad," she said at last.
"Oh, come on."
"Stace." Sata's voice was low and even. "You've spent your whole life being the person everyone leans on. You looked after your mum. You looked after Mark. You look after strangers for twelve hours a day and then you come home and look after us. When did anyone last look at you and just — want you? Not need you. Want you."
Stacy opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
"Not everything has to be forever," said Sata. "Some things are just allowed to be good for a while. That's not a failure. That's just — living."
It was, Stacy thought, the most words Sata had said in a row since about 2019. Emylia seemed to think so too, because she was staring at Sata with her mouth slightly open.
"Who are you?" said Emylia.
"Someone who's had three glasses of wine." Sata put the glass down. "Also I'm going to Lisbon for a job on Monday and I'm feeling philosophical about it."
"You didn't tell us you were going to Lisbon!"
"I'm telling you now."
"That's not telling, that's mentioning—"
And the conversation swerved, the way their conversations always did, and for a while it was about Lisbon and about the magazine that had hired Sata and about whether Emylia should come and visit, which she couldn't, because she had four events in a fortnight and a client who wanted live swans. But before they left — at half past midnight, Emylia's coat buttoned wrong, Sata carrying the empty bottles to the recycling because she couldn't bear to leave them — Emylia turned in the doorway and pointed at Stacy.
"Promise me," she said.
"Em."
"Promise. Next time he offers you something, you don't push him away. That's all. You don't have to do anything. You just don't say no out of habit."
Stacy looked at them both: Emylia, flushed and fierce and absolutely serious under the silliness; Sata behind her, saying nothing, watching Stacy's face like she was waiting for the light to be right.
"Fine," she said. "I promise."
"Say it properly."
"I promise I will not push him away out of habit."
Emylia whooped so loudly that the downstairs neighbour banged on his ceiling.
After they'd gone, Stacy stood in the kitchen with a glass of water. The junk drawer was right there. She didn't open it. She went to bed and lay awake for a long time, and the crack in the ceiling looked less like Italy in the dark, and more like a road.
Thursday was the kind of day that made nurses leave nursing.
Mrs Arbuthnot in bed four fell at 10 a.m. — nothing broken, thank God, but an hour of forms. The new admission deteriorated at lunch and had to go to HDU. Two of the afternoon staff called in sick and the agency nurse who replaced them had never worked on a medical ward and kept asking where things were, in a small, apologetic voice that made Stacy want to hug her and scream at the same time. By the time the night staff arrived, it was ten to eight and Stacy had been on her feet for twelve hours and forty minutes and had eaten half a banana.
Outside, it was raining in the specific Edinburgh way that wasn't so much falling as existing — a fine, total wetness that came at you from every direction at once. She stood under the hospital's concrete overhang and looked at her phone.
Service disruption on the 24. Buses delayed by up to 45 mins.
She shut her eyes.
"Whitlock."
She opened them.
Dan was standing at the bottom of the steps in a leather jacket, helmet in one hand, a second helmet — a second helmet — dangling from the other. Rain was running off his hair and down the side of his face and he didn't seem to notice at all.
"Heard about the buses," he said.
"How did you—"
"Priya texted me."
"Priya texted you?"
"Priya texts me all sorts." He held up the second helmet. "It's a spare. My sister's. It's clean. I can have you home in twelve minutes."
Every part of Stacy's body that had been trained by seven years of sensible decisions stood up and began to list reasons. It was raining. She'd never been on a motorbike. It was dangerous. He was a colleague. She was in her uniform under her coat and her hair was a disaster. People would see. People would talk. Mark had always said motorbikes were—
You don't say no out of habit.
She heard it in Emylia's voice, loud and certain, and underneath it, in Sata's: When did anyone last look at you and just want you?
He was looking at her. He was waiting, rain dripping off his broken nose, and he was not pushing, and he was not walking away.
"Okay," she said.
Something happened to his face. It was very quick — a flicker of surprise, and under it something warmer that he folded away before she could name it. "Yeah?"
"Yes. Before I change my mind."
"Right." He came up the steps and held out the helmet. "Then let's not give you the chance."
She screamed at the first corner. She wasn't proud of it.
By the third corner she was holding on to him so tightly that she could feel his laugh through the leather jacket, a deep rumble right under her cheek. By the Meadows, the rain had soaked through her tights and the city was a blur of streetlights and wet gold and red brake lights, and something in her chest that had been clenched for three weeks and two days — longer, maybe, much longer — came loose all at once, and she was laughing too, laughing into the back of his jacket with her eyes streaming, and she couldn't have said which part was rain.
He stopped outside her building and cut the engine. The silence rang.
She climbed off on legs that didn't quite belong to her and fumbled with the strap of the helmet. He reached over, unhooked it with two fingers, and lifted it off her head. Her hair came with it in a flat, wet, static-y mess. She knew exactly how she looked.
"Twelve minutes," she said. "You lied. It was eleven."
"I was being modest."
"You've never been modest in your life."
"You don't know that." He hung the spare helmet on the handlebar. "You don't actually know much about me, Whitlock. You've decided a lot. But you don't know."
It landed somewhere it shouldn't have. She stood on the wet pavement and looked at him, really looked at him, the way she had never let herself look before. The rain on his eyelashes. The small scar through one eyebrow she'd never noticed. The way he was standing, very still, like a man who had approached a skittish animal once or twice and knew better than to move too fast.
"How long," she heard herself ask, "have you been waiting under that overhang?"
He hesitated. That told her more than any answer.
"Why?"
"You looked tired on Monday," he said. "I didn't say bad. I said tired." He shrugged, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked something close to uncertain. "I just thought someone should take you home for once. Instead of the other way round."
She thought about the ring in the drawer. She thought about seven years of navy jumpers and five-year plans and being careful. She thought about Emylia, pointing at her from the doorway. Make it a Tuesday.
It was Thursday. She decided it didn't matter.
"Do you want to come up?" she said. "I've got nothing in the fridge, and there are boxes everywhere, and I think there's one clean mug."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took the key out of the ignition.
"I'm very good with boxes," he said.
She kissed him on the third-floor landing, before she could think about it, the way you jump into cold water. He tasted of rain. He kissed her back like he'd been waiting to do it for a lot longer than one afternoon under a concrete overhang, one hand coming up to her jaw, careful, and then not careful at all.
She found her keys on the second try.
The door closed behind them.
In the morning, there was tea.
She smelled it before she opened her eyes and lay for a second, disoriented, staring at the crack in the ceiling. Then she remembered, all at once, the way you remember a dream, and pulled the duvet up over her face and made a sound into it that she would never, ever tell anyone about.
When she came into the kitchen, wearing an old hospital fun-run T-shirt and the dignity of a woman who has decided not to be embarrassed, Dan was standing by the kettle in yesterday's jeans, reading the labels on her boxes.
"BOOKS (MINE)," he read. "Pretty aggressive labelling."
"It's been a difficult month."
"I can tell." He handed her the one clean mug. He was drinking out of a measuring jug. "This tape's rubbish, by the way. Nothing's sticking."
She laughed so suddenly that she spilled her tea.
He had to go — he had a seven-thirty start, and the bike was still parked outside on a double yellow, and there were, as he put it, hamstrings waiting. At the door he paused, helmet under his arm, and looked at her like he was about to say something. Then he didn't. He just knocked twice on the doorframe, the way he knocked on the nurses' station, and went down the stairs two at a time.
She stood in the kitchen for a while after he'd gone.
Then she opened the junk drawer and took out the velvet box. She didn't open it this time either. She found an envelope, put the box inside, and wrote Mark's name on the front in capital letters. She propped it against the kettle, where she would see it when she left, so she would remember to post it.
Her phone buzzed.
THE SUNDAY TABLE 🍳
Emylia: Morning ladies. Stace did the buses sort themselves out last night? Priya is my new best friend btw we have been in contact 😇
Sata: Emylia what did you do
Emylia: Nothing. I simply facilitated.
Emylia: Stacy.
Emylia: STACY.
Emylia: Why aren't you answering. Answering is free.
Stacy: I got a lift home.
Emylia: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
Sata: Are you okay?
Stacy: I'm really okay.
Sata: Good. ❤️ That's all I wanted to know.
Emylia: That is ABSOLUTELY NOT all I wanted to know. Brunch. Sunday. I want every detail and I want them in chronological order.
She was still smiling at the screen when a new message came in. Not from the group. From a number she'd saved four years ago for a rota swap and had never used since.
Dan Keane: Buses are off again Thursday. Just saying.
She looked at it for a long time. She looked at the envelope propped against the kettle, and at the boxes, and at the rain, which had finally stopped.
She had no idea what this was. She had no idea what it was going to be. For the first time in seven years, she didn't have a plan.
She typed: Is that an offer?
The reply came before she'd even put the phone down.
Dan Keane: It's always an offer, Whitlock.
The rules lived in the Notes app on Emylia's phone, between a shopping list from 2022 and the Wi-Fi password for her mother's house. She had typed them at two in the morning after the worst February of her life, and she had not changed a word since.
RULES FOR TUESDAY
They worked. That was the thing people never understood when she explained them, usually around the second glass of wine, usually to a woman at a hen party who had asked how she stayed so free. The rules worked. In four and a half years, Emylia Kerr had not once cried over a man in a taxi, had not once checked whether someone had read her message, had not once lain awake at four in the morning composing a speech she would never deliver.
She had also not once been happy for longer than a Tuesday. But nobody asked about that.
The Tuesday in question was called Graham.
Graham worked in fintech, which he explained over two cocktails in a basement bar on George Street, and then explained again, in case she had missed the nuance the first time. He had good teeth and a watch that cost more than her rent and a way of saying right, right while she was talking that meant he was waiting for his turn. She laughed in the right places. She touched his arm twice. At ten forty she looked at her phone, made a small disappointed face, said God, early start, I'm so sorry, and put exactly half the bill on her card.
Rule six. Rule seven. Clean as a whistle.
Out on the pavement, the October air hit her like cold water, and she stood for a moment under a streetlight with her red coat buttoned to the throat and felt the familiar, comfortable nothing settle over her. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't anything. It was the feeling of a door closing quietly in a house where nobody lived.
Her phone buzzed. Not Graham. Graham would text tomorrow, something with a winking face, and she would reply warmly and vaguely and let it die over three days like a houseplant.
It was her mother.
"You're out," said her mother, instead of hello.
"I'm on my way home, Mum."
"On a Tuesday. You're always out on a Tuesday." A pause, loaded like a dishwasher. "Your cousin Alison's engaged. Did you see? The ring's enormous. Sunday lunch, I'm doing the lamb. You'll bring someone this time."
"I have brunch on Sunday."
"You always have brunch."
"Because it's every Sunday, Mum. That's the point of it."
"Those girls," said her mother, in the tone she had used about those girls since they were nineteen and had once returned Emylia home at four in the morning, singing. "Come after, then. Two o'clock. And Emylia, the boiler's making that noise again. If you could see your way to—"
"I'll send something on Friday."
She hung up and checked her banking app, which she knew was a mistake while she was doing it. The number was red. Not very red. A tasteful, manageable, end-of-month red. Payday was eleven days away, and between now and then were four events, a dress for Imogen's wedding, and whatever her mother's boiler was going to cost.
The phone buzzed again.
Imogen: EM. Did you find them?? 🦢🦢🦢
Imogen: I had a dream about them last night. Two of them. On the pond. While we say our vows. Gliding. 😭
Imogen: I know you can make this happen. You're a miracle worker. Love you!!!
Emylia had met Imogen in first-year halls, in the same week she had met Stacy and Sata. Imogen had gone on to marry money, or rather to become engaged to it, and had hired Emylia to plan her wedding at a price that was technically a discount and practically a favour. She was sweet and generous and believed with her whole heart that anything was possible if you wanted it enough, which was a wonderful quality in a friend and a nightmare in a client.
Emylia: On it!! 🦢❤️
She put the phone in her pocket, buttoned her coat one more notch, and walked home alone through the New Town, her heels loud on the stone. It was ten fifty-two on a Tuesday. None of it counted.
The Glasshouse stood at the bottom of Dean Village, where the Water of Leith ran fast and brown between old stone mills, and it was the most beautiful building Emylia had ever booked. It had been a Victorian orchid house, then a ruin, then, after six years and a fortune in conservation grants, a wedding venue: an iron-ribbed cathedral of glass with a long, shallow pond running down the middle and ferns spilling from every ledge. On a clear afternoon, the light came through it like something you could drink.
It was not a clear afternoon. It was Wednesday, and raining, and Moira, the venue manager, was explaining for the third time why swans were impossible.
"It's not up to me, pet," said Moira. "Anything on the pond has to be signed off by the architect. Listed structure. He's very particular."
"I'm sure he can be persuaded."
"Oh, I'm sure," said Moira, in a voice that meant the opposite. "He's here now, as it happens."
Emylia turned.
The man coming down the iron walkway was not what she had pictured. She had pictured someone older, with half-moon glasses and a fondness for the word heritage. This man was perhaps thirty-five, tall and rather narrow, in a dark wool coat with rain on the shoulders and a notebook in one hand. He had a long, serious face and dark hair cut short and, as far as she could tell, no interest whatsoever in the fact that she was standing there in her red coat with her best smile already switched on.
"Ewan Faulkner," said Moira. "Ewan, this is Emylia. She's doing the Ashworth wedding."
"Hello," said Emylia, putting out her hand. "I've heard you're very particular."
He shook it. His hand was warm and dry and he let go at exactly the right moment, not a second later. "I am," he said. "Moira says you want swans."
"My client wants swans."
"Same thing, from the pond's point of view." He crouched at the edge of the water, very much as though she weren't there, and pressed two fingers against the stone lip of the pond. "This is about forty-five centimetres deep. The lining underneath is original puddled clay, from 1871. It's the reason the building has a grant and not a demolition order." He looked up at her. He had grey eyes, she noticed, and wished she hadn't. "An adult mute swan weighs about twelve kilos and has the temperament of a bailiff. It'll go through that lining in an afternoon. And then it'll go for the bride."
"They can be trained."
"They can't."
"Hired swans are very well-behaved."
"Have you ever met one?"
She had not, in fact, met one. She had found exactly one company in the whole of Scotland that rented swans for events, and it had an answering machine that played bagpipe music and nobody had ever called her back.
She brought out the smile again. The full one, the one that had got her a free upgrade in Lisbon and a table at the Witchery on a Saturday night and, once, a policeman to let her off a parking ticket while he was actively writing it. "Mr Faulkner," she said. "Ewan. Can I call you Ewan? I've got a bride who has dreamed of this since she was seven years old. She's lovely. She's my friend. She cries at adverts for building societies. If there's any way at all—"
He stood up. He didn't smile back. He didn't look annoyed, either. He just looked at her the way people look at a building, she thought later: as though he was working out where the weight was carried.
"You're not actually trying to get swans," he said. "Are you."
"I'm sorry?"
"You know it won't work. You knew before you came. You're trying to get your friend to stop texting you about swans." He said it quite gently. "That's a different problem."
Somewhere above them, the rain drummed on a hundred and fifty years of glass.
Emylia opened her mouth to say something devastating, and found that nothing devastating was available.
"Let me think about it," he said. He took a card from his coat pocket and held it out. It was plain and heavy and said FAULKNER CONSERVATION ARCHITECTS, LEITH and nothing else. "There may be another way to give her what she actually wants."
"And what does she actually want?"
"I don't know yet," said Ewan Faulkner. "I've only just met her problem."
He nodded to Moira and went back up the walkway with his notebook, and Emylia stood by the pond with the card in her hand and the strangest feeling, as though she had been very gently and very thoroughly seen through, like a pane of glass held up to the light.
"Told you," said Moira. "Particular."
Lula's on Broughton Street had been their Sunday place for eleven years. It had changed owners twice and menus four times, and the corner table by the window had a wobbly leg that no amount of folded napkins could fix, and none of them would have sat anywhere else.
Stacy arrived first, which never happened. Emylia saw her through the window before she went in and stopped dead on the pavement.
Stacy was glowing.
There was no other word for it. She was sitting at the wobbly table in a jumper Emylia had never seen her wear, with her hair loose instead of scraped back, and she was looking at nothing in particular out of the window and smiling at it. Smiling at a bus. Nine days ago she had been sitting on the floor of her half-empty flat looking like someone had let all the air out of her, and now she was smiling at a number 8 bus as though it had told her a joke.
Emylia felt two things at once, so close together that she couldn't separate them. The first was joy, enormous and uncomplicated, the kind that made her want to bang on the glass. The second was smaller and lower and she didn't look at it directly. It was a little like envy. It was a little like standing outside a lit window on a cold night.
She banged on the glass. Stacy jumped a foot in the air.
"Chronological order," said Emylia, sliding into the chair opposite. "Every detail. Start with the helmet."
"How do you know about the helmet?"
"Priya and I have an understanding."
Sata was there too, in a manner of speaking. Her face filled Emylia's phone, which was propped against the sugar bowl, and behind her was a wash of light so gold and generous that it made Lula's look like the inside of a filing cabinet. She was on a rooftop somewhere in Lisbon with a coffee cup, her hair tied up, squinting.
"It's eleven o'clock here and already twenty-two degrees," said Sata. "I want you both to know I'm thinking of you in the rain."
"Shut up," said Emylia. "We're doing Stacy."
So they did Stacy. Stacy told it properly, in order, the overhang and the spare helmet and the scream at the first corner, and Emylia whooped at the right places and Sata made small, approving noises from Portugal. Stacy blushed through the bit about the third-floor landing and stopped altogether at the door, and Emylia, for once in her life, didn't push. She just reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
"I told you," she said. "Make it a Tuesday."
"It was a Thursday."
"Close enough. What happens now?"
"I don't know," said Stacy, and smiled again, that new smile, as if not knowing was a gift she'd been handed. "He's taking me for chips on Thursday. He says the chippy on Elm Row is the best in Edinburgh and he'll fight anyone who disagrees."
"Will you disagree?"
"I might," said Stacy. "Just to see."
On the screen, someone said something behind Sata, a man's voice, low and amused, a few words in Portuguese. Sata turned her head away from the camera and answered in a murmur, and when she turned back she was a fraction too composed.
"Who was that?" said Emylia.
"Nobody. The — it's someone from the magazine." Sata looked at something off-screen. "I have to go. The light's about to change. I'll call you later."
"Sata—"
The screen went black.
Stacy and Emylia looked at each other across the wobbly table.
"Nobody from the magazine," said Stacy slowly, "says a luz in that voice."
"You speak Portuguese now?"
"I watched a lot of telly after Mark left." Stacy picked up her coffee. "Your turn."
"My turn for what?"
"Emylia Kerr. You walked in here with a face like you'd swallowed a lightbulb, and it wasn't just about me." Stacy leaned forward. "Who is he?"
Emylia considered lying. She was very good at lying, in the light, social, harmless way that kept dinner parties moving and clients calm. But Stacy had known her since she was nineteen, and Stacy had just told her the whole story of the helmet, and some debts had to be paid in kind.
"He's an architect," she said. "He's very tall and very quiet and he's said maybe forty words to me and every one of them was annoying. He doesn't laugh at my jokes. He told me I wasn't really trying to get swans."
"Were you really trying to get swans?"
"No, obviously not, swans are psychopaths, but that's not the point."
Stacy was looking at her with an expression Emylia had never seen her wear before, an expression of pure, slow-dawning delight. It was how Emylia imagined she herself had looked, nine days ago, on the floor of Stacy's flat.
"Oh, no," said Emylia.
"Don't think," said Stacy. "Just say yes."
"That advice was for you. I have a system."
"The rules." Stacy rolled her eyes so hard it was audible. "Go on, then. Say them. Out loud, to my face."
So Emylia did, counting them off on her fingers, and somewhere around rule four she heard how they sounded in the plain Sunday light of Lula's, and around rule seven she stopped looking at Stacy and looked at the window instead.
"You wrote those after Finn," said Stacy quietly.
"I wrote them after a lot of people."
"You wrote them after Finn. February 2022. You'd been with him eight months and he went on tour and stopped answering, and you found out from his Instagram, and you sat in my bathroom for a whole night." Stacy's voice was very gentle. "And then you came out with a list."
Emylia didn't answer. Finn had been a bass player with sleepy eyes and terrible timing in everything except music. She had not said his name out loud in four and a half years. It was rule eight, really, the one she'd never written down.
"Which of them will the architect break?" said Stacy.
"None of them. He's not even interested."
"You said he saw through you."
"That's not the same thing."
Stacy put down her cup.
"Em," she said. "It's the only thing."
He emailed on Thursday. Not a text: an email, with a subject line that said only Ashworth / pond, and an attachment.
The attachment was a drawing. Pencil, on cream paper, scanned slightly crooked. It showed the long pond in the Glasshouse at dusk, and floating on the water, scattered down its whole length like petals, were dozens of small white paper swans. Each one had a tiny light inside it. The light came up through the folded paper and lay on the water in soft gold pools, and above them the iron ribs of the glass roof caught the glow and threw it back.
Waxed paper, tea lights, weighted bases, he had written underneath, in small square capitals. Fifty would cover the length. Nothing heavier than 30g on the water. Can test on site Monday 6pm if useful. — E.F.
She looked at it for a long time at her desk, among the seating plans and the invoices and the mug of cold coffee she had forgotten to drink. Then she forwarded it to Imogen with no message at all, because she didn't trust herself to write one.
Imogen called eleven seconds later, in tears.
On Monday at six the Glasshouse was empty, and darker than Emylia had ever seen it, and very quiet except for the river.
He was already there, kneeling at the edge of the pond with a cardboard box beside him. He'd folded the swans himself. She could tell, because they weren't perfect. One had a slightly crooked neck and another had a wing creased in the wrong place, and there was something about the idea of this serious, long-faced man sitting at a desk in Leith at midnight folding paper birds that made her throat do something unexpected.
"Did you make all of these?"
"Twelve so far. I'm slow." He lit one with a long match and set it on the water, and it sat there, perfectly upright, and glowed. "Thirty grams. It won't touch the clay."
She lit the second one. He lit the third. They did not talk. That was the strange thing, she would think afterwards. Emylia talked, always. Silence, to her, was a space that needed filling, a dead air on a radio show, a lull at a dinner party that made the host's eyes go anxious. But he didn't seem to need anything filled, and after a while, kneeling side by side on the cold stone, she found she didn't either.
Twelve paper swans drifted down the dark water, and the glass above them caught the light and held it.
"She's going to cry," said Emylia at last. "Imogen. She's going to cry so much her mascara ends up in the pond."
"Is that good?"
"That's the best possible outcome."
He looked at her sideways. For the first time since she'd met him, something happened at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile, exactly. It was more like the place where a smile would go if it were ever invited.
"Have dinner with me," he said. "Thursday."
The rules sat up in her head like a row of meerkats.
"I only do Tuesdays," she said. She made it light. She made it a joke.
"I can't do Tuesdays."
"Why not?"
"My gran," he said. "Tuesdays I take her to the bingo in Portobello. She's ninety-one. She cheats." He blew out his match. "Thursday."
She should have said no. She had said no to better offers from smoother men in nicer coats. She opened her mouth to say no.
"Thursday," she heard herself say.
Rule one, she thought, watching the last swan drift into the dark at the far end of the pond. Gone, just like that, for a man whose grandmother cheated at bingo.
The restaurant was small and on the Shore in Leith and lit mostly by candles, and Emylia decided before the starters arrived that the only fair thing to do was to warn him.
"Full disclosure," she said, over the bread. "I have a policy."
"A policy."
"About dating. It's a sort of — framework." She took a sip of wine. "I think it's only right you know what you're getting into. So nobody's disappointed."
He put down his fork, folded his hands, and gave her his full attention, which was a considerable amount of attention, all of it grey-eyed and unhurried. And she told him. All seven. She did it the way she did it at hen parties, with jokes and hand gestures, his place has photographs, a fourth date is a relationship, and she waited for him to laugh, or to be offended, or to make a crack about how he'd have to be the one who changed her mind, the way men always did.
He didn't do any of those things. He listened to all seven without interrupting. Then he said:
"Who wrote them?"
"I did."
"No," said Ewan, quite gently. "I mean, who were they for?"
The candle between them guttered and righted itself.
She talked about her father. She had absolutely no idea how it happened. One minute she was being charming about rule five, no family, and the next she was telling him about the morning when she was seven, the car gone from the drive and the record player gone from the living room and her mother sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, very still, holding a mug of tea that had gone cold. About the single postcard that had come from Málaga the following spring. About how she had kept it in a shoebox until she was fifteen and then burnt it in the back garden with a lighter she had stolen from Sata's older brother.
She didn't cry. She was very clear with herself about that afterwards. But her voice went strange at the end, and she had to look at the harbour for a while, and he didn't fill the silence with anything. He just waited, the way he'd waited by the pond, as though there was all the time in the world.
"So that's rule five," she said finally, and tried to laugh. "Gone. Well done. Very efficient."
"I wasn't trying to break it."
"I know," said Emylia. "That's what's so annoying."
When the bill came, she reached for it first, the way she always did. Rule six. She put her card on the little silver tray with a flourish, and the waiter went away and came back again, and bent down beside her with the soft, terrible tact of someone who has done this many times before, and murmured that he was so sorry, but it seemed to have been declined.
The heat went up her face like a struck match.
She had known. Of course she had known. She had checked the app on Tuesday night under a streetlight on George Street. She had sent her mother money for the boiler on Friday because her mother had called three times, and she had told herself she'd move something around before Thursday, and she had been so busy, and she had forgotten. She started to explain, something about a payment that hadn't gone through yet, and heard how her voice sounded, high and bright and false, her party voice, her it's fine voice.
Ewan handed the waiter his own card without looking at it. He didn't make a joke. He didn't make a speech. He didn't, thank God, say don't worry about it in the tone men used when they very much wanted you to worry about it.
"You can get the next one," he said.
"There isn't going to be a next one. That's rule two."
"Then you'll owe me forever." He signed the slip. "That sounds terrible for you."
She laughed. She didn't mean to. It came out of her like something that had been stuck, and she put her hand over her mouth, and across the table, at last, for the first time, Ewan Faulkner smiled. It changed his whole face. It was like watching the lights come on in a building you had only ever seen in the dark.
THE SUNDAY TABLE 🍳
Emylia: Status report. Rules broken since Monday: 1, 5 and 6.
Stacy: IN ONE WEEK??
Emylia: In one DINNER, mostly.
Sata: What happened to 6
Emylia: I don't want to talk about 6.
Sata: Okay. Are you alright?
Emylia: Weirdly yes. That's the problem.
Stacy: How many are left?
Emylia: Four. The important ones.
Stacy: Dan says hi btw. I didn't tell him anything. He just says hi to everyone.
Emylia: Tell Dan I said hi and that if he hurts you I'll put him through a plate glass window. I know an architect.
Sata: 😂
Stacy: Sata. Who's NOBODY FROM THE MAGAZINE.
Sata: I'm going to sleep now. Goodnight. ❤️
The second date was a walk on Portobello beach on Sunday afternoon, after Emylia had sat through her mother's Sunday lamb and her cousin Alison's enormous ring and the question, asked four times over dessert, of whether she was seeing anyone. She'd said no. She'd said it every time, smiling, and every time it had felt a little more like a lie.
The wind came off the Firth of Forth like a slap. Ewan walked on the sea side without being asked and didn't hold her hand and didn't try to, and they talked about buildings, which turned out to be a way of talking about everything. He told her about the house on Skye he'd designed in his last year at university for a client who'd died before it was built, and how he still had the model. She told him about the worst wedding she'd ever worked, where the groom's mother had arrived in white. He laughed out loud at that one, a short, surprised sound that sent a gull wheeling off the sand.
The third date was Tuesday.
It wasn't a date, technically. It was the full rehearsal, fifty paper swans on the pond at the Glasshouse, and Imogen was there, and Imogen's mother, and the photographer, and Moira, and the florist with a clipboard, so it couldn't possibly count. When the last tea light was lit and the long dark water filled up with soft gold from one end to the other, Imogen cried so hard that her mascara did, in fact, end up in the pond, and her mother cried, and Moira pretended to have something in her eye.
Emylia didn't cry. She stood at the far end of the Glasshouse by the iron pillars and looked at it all, and felt something so large and quiet rise up in her chest that she had to hold on to the cold metal.
Ewan was standing beside her. She hadn't heard him come. He did that.
"It was your idea," she said. "You should be up there getting the credit."
"I just folded paper. You made it happen."
"I emailed a drawing to a crying woman."
"You booked this building eleven months ago, before anyone else could. You found Imogen a florist who works with ferns. You've been here every week. Moira says you're the only planner who ever asks how she is." He was looking at the pond, not at her. "I notice things. It's most of the job."
By the time everyone had gone, it was nearly ten and pouring again, the rain hammering on the glass like it wanted to be let in.
She sat down on the edge of the pond. She didn't decide to; her legs just stopped. Four events in a fortnight. A mother with a boiler. An overdraft with teeth. A bride in tears, a phone that never stopped, and a red coat that had been holding her up for years like scaffolding. She was so tired. She hadn't known how tired until the building went quiet and there was nothing left to perform for.
"I can't remember the last time I slept more than five hours," she said to the water.
He sat down next to her, not too close.
"Come home with me," he said. "I'll make you something to eat. I've got soup. You can sleep on the sofa, or you can go home in a taxi after. That's all it has to be."
She looked at him. Rain on the glass above them, the last of the paper swans drifting in a dark corner, one with a crooked neck.
Rule three, she thought. Never his place. His place has photographs.
"Okay," she said.
His place was above his studio, in an old warehouse near the Shore, up a flight of iron stairs that rang under their feet. It was bigger than she'd expected and emptier: plain wooden floors, too many books, one good lamp, a drawing table under the window. On the shelves there were photographs. A tiny old woman in a sequinned hat, grinning, holding up a bingo card. A boy in a school blazer with the same long, serious face. A house on a cliff in the mist.
And there, on the windowsill, under a sheet of glass, was the model. The house on Skye. Small and low and made of balsa wood and card, set into a slope of painted hillside, its whole front a single wall of glass facing the sea.
"Who's it for now?" she asked.
He was standing behind her. She could feel the warmth of him, not touching.
"Nobody yet," he said.
She turned around.
She would have liked to say she thought about it. That she weighed it up, rule by rule, like a sensible woman. But the truth was she didn't think about anything at all. She put her hands flat against his chest, against the damp wool of his coat, and felt his heart going under them, not quiet at all, not calm at all, as fast as hers. He said her name, just once, as if it was a question. She answered it.
He kissed her slowly, the way he did everything, as though there were all the time in the world, and as though he'd been thinking about it since the day she'd tried to sell him swans.
Somewhere behind them the lamp was still on. Somewhere outside the rain was still coming down on Leith.
It's Tuesday, she thought, with the last sensible part of her mind. None of this counts.
She knew, even as she thought it, that it was the biggest lie she had ever told herself.
Behind them, the door to the stairs swung shut on the rain.
She woke at twenty to six, the way she always did after, with the old alarm going off somewhere inside her.
The room was grey with early light. He was asleep beside her on his front, one arm flung out, his face turned away. She slid out from under the duvet without a sound. She was very good at this. Rule seven was the oldest rule of all, older than the list, older than Finn. She had been leaving first since she was seven years old and standing at the window watching an empty driveway.
She found her dress on the floor and her tights on the chair and one boot by the door and the other, eventually, under the drawing table. She carried them both in one hand and her coat over her arm and went down the short hallway on bare feet, past the photographs, towards the kitchen and the door beyond it.
The kitchen light was on.
Ewan was sitting at the table in a grey jumper with a pot of coffee and a rack of toast, reading something on his phone. He looked up as she came in, boots in hand, coat over her arm, exactly like what she was.
He didn't look surprised. He didn't look hurt. He just looked at her the way he'd looked at the pond on the first day, as though he were working out where the weight was carried.
"There's coffee," he said. "You can take it with you, if you're going. I just thought you shouldn't leave hungry."
She stood in the doorway.
Rule four, never stay for breakfast. Rule seven, leave first. And here they were, the two of them, facing each other across a kitchen in Leith, and for once in her life she understood that she could only keep one.
She put down her boots.
She sat at the table. He poured her a coffee without asking how she took it and pushed the milk towards her, and she realised he'd watched her order at the restaurant, and at the beach café, and remembered. She ate a slice of toast. Then another. Neither of them said anything for a while, and it was the most comfortable silence of her whole life.
"That was four dates," she said eventually. "Rule two. A fourth date is a relationship."
"Five, if you count the swan test."
"You've been counting?"
"I'm an architect," said Ewan. "I measure things." He topped up her coffee. "Thursday?"
"That's against at least three rules."
"I know," he said. "You told me. I listened."
She looked at him over the rim of the mug: the long face, the grey eyes, the jumper with a small hole in the elbow that he'd obviously never noticed. Outside the window the sky over the Firth was going from grey to the faintest, most reluctant gold.
"Thursday," said Emylia.
She walked home. It was a long way from Leith to her flat in Stockbridge and her feet hurt and she didn't care. The city was just waking up, buses sighing at their stops, a man hosing down the pavement outside a bakery, gulls arguing on a bin.
Halfway up Leith Walk she took out her phone and opened her Notes app and looked at the rules for a long time. She didn't delete them. She wasn't ready for that. But she scrolled down to the bottom, below rule seven, and after a moment she typed:
8. ?
She was smiling at it, standing in the middle of the pavement like an idiot, when the phone buzzed in her hand. A number she didn't have saved. A number she didn't need to have saved, because she had once known it by heart.
Hey Em. Imogen just told me you're planning her wedding. Turns out I'm the best man. Long time. Hope that's okay. — R.
Emylia stood very still on Leith Walk while the morning went on around her.
Then she put the phone in her pocket, buttoned her red coat to the throat, and kept walking. But she was no longer smiling, and she didn't notice when she started walking faster.
Sata saw the light before she saw anything else. She always had.
When she was six, her father had taken her into the front room of their house in Leith, where the old upright piano stood against the wall, and lifted the lid, and shown her the hammers and the strings and the felt. Before you can play a note, he'd said, in the careful English he had never quite stopped translating in his head, you must listen to what the room is doing. He had been a piano tuner for forty years. He listened to rooms the way other people read newspapers.
Sata had never learned to play the piano. But she had learned to look at a room before she walked into it: where the light came from, where it went, which corners it never reached. She had been doing it for twenty-seven years. It was how she earned her living now, and on good days it felt like the only thing she had ever really known how to do.
The flat in Alfama had one window that mattered. It faced east, across a lane so narrow she could have passed a coffee cup to the building opposite, and at seven fifteen on her first morning in Lisbon the sun came over the rooftops and hit the front of that building, and Sata, who had been half asleep with her face in a pillow that smelled of somebody else's washing powder, sat straight up in bed.
The building opposite was covered in tiles. Blue and white, hundreds of them, most of them cracked or missing, the old pattern of birds and vines broken up like a sentence with half the words rubbed out. A scaffold had been built against it, three storeys of grey poles and planks. And the light, the low gold October light, was coming across the tiles at such a slant that every crack and chip and glaze-bubble stood out in relief, and the whole wall looked as if it were breathing.
She had her camera in her hands before she was properly awake.
She got four frames. On the fifth, a man climbed up onto the second level of the scaffold with a bucket and a cloth, right into the middle of her picture, and stood there looking at the wall with his hands on his hips like it had personally disappointed him.
She lowered the camera. She did not photograph strangers without asking. It was the one rule she had, if she had any rules at all, which Emylia would say she didn't.
The man on the scaffold must have felt it, the way people sometimes do. He turned and looked straight across the lane at her window, at her, standing there in an old T-shirt with her hair everywhere and a Leica in her hands. He didn't wave. He didn't look annoyed. He just tilted his head, very slightly, the way you might acknowledge someone across a quiet room.
Then he went back to his tiles, and she went back to bed, and lay looking at the ceiling with her heart going faster than it had any business going at seven twenty in the morning.
The job was twelve days. A travel magazine in London was running eight pages on Lisbon in autumn, and the editor, a woman called Harriet who spoke exclusively in voice notes, wanted forty images by the end of the second week. Light, Sata. That's why we hired you. Nobody does light like you. I want October. I want the city exhaling. There was a kill fee in the contract if the pictures weren't usable, and Sata had read that clause four times on the plane.
She needed this job. That was the plain truth, under all the gold and the tiles. A client in Berlin still owed her for a catalogue she'd shot in June, and every email she sent them came back more politely than the last and no closer to money. Her rent in Edinburgh was due on the first. Freelance life was beautiful in the way the sea was beautiful: wide and free and absolutely indifferent to whether or not you drowned.
So she worked. She was up before dawn every day, walking the steep cobbled lanes with the camera against her chest, waiting on corners for the sun to arrive. She shot the yellow trams grinding up the hill at Graça and the washing strung between windows like prayer flags and the old women on folding chairs outside their doors, after asking, always after asking. She shot the river at noon, flat and silver and impossible, and the castle walls at four, going the colour of apricots.
And every day, somehow, he was in the corner of the frame.
Not on purpose. She was sure of that, at first. But on Tuesday he was walking up the stairs at Escadinhas de São Cristóvão, plaster dust on his forearms, a paper bag of bread under his arm, just as she pressed the shutter from the top. On Wednesday he was sitting on the river wall at Cais das Colunas, smoking, a small dark figure at the far edge of a picture that was otherwise all water and sky. On Thursday morning he was on the scaffold again, opposite her window, and when she came out onto her tiny balcony with her coffee he looked across and said, in English, very politely, as though they'd been introduced:
"Good morning. You are missing the light."
She looked up. He was right. The sun had already moved off the tiles.
"It comes at seven ten now," he said. "Not seven fifteen. Every day a little earlier. You should set your alarm."
"How do you know what time I set my alarm?"
"Because every morning at seven fifteen," he said, "you come to the window with your hair like a bird's nest, and every morning you are five minutes too late, and you make a face." He made the face. It was, she had to admit, an accurate face.
She should have been annoyed. Instead she laughed, out loud, on a balcony in Alfama at ten past eight in the morning, and it sounded so strange to her own ears that she stopped.
"I'm Sata," she said.
"Duarte." He wiped his hand on his trousers as though he might reach across the lane to shake hers, then seemed to think better of it. "I restore the tiles. This building is nineteenth century. Very sad. Many tiles stolen, many broken by idiots. I put them back." He shrugged. "Slowly."
"How slowly?"
"I have been on this wall for seven months," said Duarte. "I think maybe four more."
Seven months on one wall. Sata had not been in one place for seven months since she was twenty-two.
Her mother called on Thursday evening while Sata was sitting on the floor of the flat with her laptop, sorting the day's pictures. Her mother always called on Thursdays, at seven Edinburgh time, which was seven Lisbon time too, because the two cities kept the same clock in autumn, a fact that Sata found more unsettling than it had any right to be.
"Are you eating?" said her mother.
"I'm in Portugal, Mum. It's impossible not to eat."
"Your dad wants a word."
There was a fumble and a muffled exchange, and then her father's voice, slow and soft, as if it were coming from further away than Leith. "Satomi."
He was the only person who still called her that. Satomi, wise beauty, a name chosen by a grandmother in Onomichi whom Sata had met exactly twice. At school in Edinburgh it had been shortened in the first week to Sata, and it had stuck, and she had been glad of it, the way you are glad at eleven of anything that makes you less different.
"Hi, Dad."
"Your mother says you are in Lisbon."
"For a magazine. Twelve days."
"Good light there?"
"The best."
"Good," said her father, and then he coughed. It went on a little too long, and she heard her mother say something in the background, and when he came back to the phone his voice had gone even softer. "When are you coming home?"
"Friday week."
"No, I mean," he said, and stopped, and seemed to change his mind about whatever he'd meant. "Come and see us. When you're back. I'll tune the piano. You can tell me if I have still got the ear."
"You've always got the ear, Dad."
Her mother came back on and said that the cough was nothing, it was just the weather, the GP was doing some tests next month, just routine, love, you know what they're like, and was Sata really eating, and Sata said yes, and yes, and love you too, and hung up.
She sat on the floor for a long time afterwards, with the laptop glowing and forty pictures of strangers' doorways on the screen, and didn't look at any of them.
On Saturday evening she went to the Miradouro de Santa Luzia, the viewpoint every guidebook sent you to, because Harriet had asked in a voice note for the classic sunset, Sata, but make it not classic. The terrace was already crowded with phones and selfie sticks and a busker playing a song from a film, and the light was doing what light did over the river at sunset, which was very pretty and completely obvious.
She was setting up the tripod when someone said, behind her:
"Wrong place."
Duarte was leaning on the railing with his hands in his pockets. He'd changed out of his work clothes into a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and without the plaster dust he looked younger, perhaps thirty-eight, with grey coming in at the temples and the deep sun lines around his eyes of someone who had spent years on scaffolds facing south.
"Are you following me?" said Sata.
"I live four minutes from here. I could ask you the same thing." He nodded at the sunset. "This is the light everybody has. You want the light nobody has, yes? That is your job?"
"That's my job."
"Then come," said Duarte. "But quickly. We have eleven minutes."
She should not have gone. She had known him for three days, across a lane, through a lens. She was a woman alone in a foreign city at dusk. She thought of all the things Stacy would say, carefully, and all the things Emylia would say, loudly, and picked up her tripod and went.
He led her down a lane she would never have found, then down a flight of steps between two houses so close that the walls almost touched over her head, and then out, suddenly, onto a small square no bigger than a room. There was a fig tree and a fountain that didn't work and a long, crumbling staircase going down the far side towards the river. And at the bottom of the staircase, between two buildings, there was a slot of sky, and in the slot was the sun.
It was coming straight up the steps. Every single stone was gold. The light poured up the staircase like water poured the wrong way, filling every crack, catching the dust in the air so that the whole space seemed full of slow-falling sparks.
Sata forgot about him. She forgot about Harriet and the kill fee and the client in Berlin and her father's cough. She dropped to one knee on the cobbles and shot and shot and shot, and the light kept coming, and coming, and then it was gone, all at once, as if somebody had shut a door.
She stayed kneeling there for a moment, breathing as though she'd been running.
"Eleven minutes," said Duarte quietly, behind her. "Maybe ten. In winter it does not reach at all."
"How did you know about this?"
"I tiled the fountain. Six years ago." He touched the edge of it with his fingertips. Blue and white tiles, a pattern of waves. "When you work on one place for a long time, you learn what the light does there. Every hour. Every season. You cannot learn it in a day."
She looked down at the screen of her camera. She had the best photograph of the whole trip. She knew it the way you know you've just heard someone say your name in another room. It was the staircase, blazing gold, rising out of shadow.
And there was Duarte in it. Small, at the very edge of the frame, a dark shape against the light, one hand on the fountain, looking not at the sunset but at her.
It went like that, after.
He would knock on the scaffold pole opposite her window at seven in the morning, two knocks, and she'd come out with her coffee and he would tell her where the light would be that day. The fish market at Ribeira, eleven o'clock, the ice. The tram depot at Santo Amaro, but only from the north side. The old cemetery at Prazeres, four o'clock, the cypresses. You will not like it but you will photograph it. He was always right. It was infuriating. She told him so.
In the evenings, when he'd finished on the wall and she'd finished on the streets, they began to walk. He showed her the city the way she'd always wanted to see a city and never quite could, from the inside: the bakery where the old man still made pastéis at five in the morning and left the door open so the street could smell them; the bar with no name where an elderly woman sang fado on Wednesdays and nobody was allowed to talk; the tiny museum of tiles where he had trained when he was nineteen, the walls blue and white from floor to ceiling, so that walking into it was like walking into the sea.
He talked about tiles the way her father talked about pianos: as though they were alive, as though they remembered things.
"Every tile in Lisbon," he said, "was made for one wall. Only that wall. When I take a broken one down, I must make the new one in the same blue. Not almost the same. The same. Or the wall will know."
"Walls don't know things."
"You are a photographer," said Duarte, "and you think walls do not know things?" He shook his head at her, mock-sorrowful. "Then you have been doing it wrong."
She told him things too. Not everything. Not at first. She told him about Leith and the piano, about her father's hands and her mother's Thursday calls. She told him about Emylia and Stacy, the Sunday table, the group chat that never stopped. She told him about the cities: Berlin, Copenhagen, Marrakech, Reykjavík, Tbilisi, a year in New York that had felt like ten, a summer in Hokkaido trying to find out if she was Japanese enough to belong there (she wasn't). Twelve years of airports. Twelve years of rented rooms with somebody else's washing powder on the pillows.
"You do not stay," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I don't stay."
"Why?"
She thought about it, walking down the hill towards the river with the city going blue around them.
"When I was small," she said, "I was the only Japanese-looking girl in my school. I was always being looked at. Always. Not in a bad way, mostly. Just — looked at. And I hated it. I wanted to be the one looking." She lifted the camera slightly. "So I found a way. And then I found that if you keep moving, nobody looks at you long enough to really see you. You're always the new person, the visitor. You're always just passing through."
"And that is good?"
"It's safe," said Sata. "That's not the same thing."
He didn't say anything for a while. A tram ground past them up the hill, yellow and lit and nearly empty, bell clanging.
"Everybody leaves Lisbon," he said at last. "It is a city of people leaving. The sailors, the explorers, the ones who went to Brazil, to France, to London to wash dishes. We have a whole word for it. Saudade. The feeling for a thing that is gone, or that maybe never was. We are very good at being left." He glanced at her sideways. "So you do not need to worry. The city is used to it."
"And you?"
He smiled, the lines deepening around his eyes.
"I have been on one wall for seven months," said Duarte. "I am not a man who worries about four more days."
On Sunday morning she was on the roof terrace of his building, where his neighbour grew tomatoes in old olive oil tins, with her coffee and her phone propped against a tin, calling home.
Not home. Brunch. Lula's on Broughton Street, the wobbly table, the window. She could see it all over Emylia's shoulder on the tiny screen, Edinburgh grey and soft with rain, Stacy across the table with a face Sata had never seen her wear before. Stacy was glowing. There was no other word. She told the story of a man called Dan and a spare motorbike helmet, and Sata made the right noises and felt something in her chest go very light and very full at once, because this was Stacy, careful Stacy, who had spent seven years being sensible, laughing until she had to put her hand over her face.
Behind her, Duarte came up the stairs to the roof with a plate of bread and cheese. He set it down on the wall, out of shot. Then he looked over her shoulder towards the river and said, softly, in Portuguese, the way you might mention the weather to someone you'd known for years:
"Sata, a luz. Está a mudar."
The light. It's changing.
She turned her head to answer, and when she turned back, Emylia's eyes on the screen had gone narrow and bright as a cat's.
"Who was that?"
"Nobody," said Sata. She heard herself say it, and heard how it sounded, and couldn't stop. "The — it's someone from the magazine." She looked away from the camera, at the river, which was indeed changing, going from silver to a deep, glassy blue. "I have to go. The light's about to change. I'll call you later."
She ended the call before Emylia could say her name.
Duarte was looking at her. He had understood enough. He understood most things.
"Someone from the magazine," he said.
"I'm sorry."
"No." He sat on the wall beside the tomato tins and tore a piece of bread in half and handed her one. "I think you have not told them about me because if you tell them, I am real. And if I am real," he went on, quite calmly, chewing, "then on Friday you must leave something real. That is harder than leaving a city. Cities do not mind."
She sat down next to him. She didn't answer, because he was right, and because the light really was changing, and because she didn't trust her voice.
The second week went faster than the first. They always did.
She shot all day and walked with him all evening and slept badly, alone, in the rented flat across the lane, lying awake listening to the city. Some nights she could hear him through his open window opposite, playing a radio very low, old fado songs, a woman's voice going up and up into the dark.
On Monday night Emylia sent a photograph to the group chat: a long dark pond in a glasshouse, with a dozen tiny white paper swans drifting down it, every one of them glowing.
Emylia: LOOK. LOOK AT IT.
Stacy: Em that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen 😭
Sata: Who folded them?
Emylia: Don't.
Sata: Emylia. Who folded them.
Emylia: I said DON'T. 🦢
Sata smiled at the screen, alone in the dark flat. She thought of a man she'd never met, sitting up at midnight folding paper birds for a woman who said don't. Then she looked out of the window at the scaffold across the lane, silver in the streetlight, and at the dark window beyond it, and stopped smiling.
On Wednesday night Stacy called. Late, after a shift; Sata could hear the bus in the background and the tiredness in her voice.
"You've been quiet," said Stacy.
"I've been working."
"Sata." Stacy's voice was very gentle. It was the voice she used on the ward, Sata knew, at three in the morning, with frightened people. "You sat on my living room floor two weeks ago and told me that some things are allowed to be good for a while. That it wasn't a failure. That it was just living." A pause. "Does that only apply to me?"
Sata looked out of the window. Across the lane, his light was on.
"I don't know how to do it," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant. "The — being seen part. I don't know how to do that."
"Nobody does," said Stacy. "I didn't. I screamed at the first corner."
On Thursday night, when Emylia's message came in, the one with all the rules, rules broken since Monday: 1, 5 and 6, and Stacy demanded to know who NOBODY FROM THE MAGAZINE was, Sata typed I'm going to sleep now and put the phone face down on the table in the bar with no name, where an old woman was singing fado and nobody was allowed to talk, and Duarte was sitting next to her in the dark with his shoulder against hers.
The last day was Friday. Her flight was at six the next morning.
She'd delivered forty-two images to Harriet at noon and received, eleven minutes later, a voice note consisting almost entirely of the word yes. She had walked the whole of Alfama one last time and photographed nothing. She had packed. She was always good at packing. She could fit twelve days into one bag and a camera case and leave a room looking as though nobody had ever been in it at all.
At seven in the evening he knocked on the scaffold pole. Two knocks.
She came out onto the balcony. He was standing on the second level of the scaffold, right opposite her, close enough to touch if they'd both leaned out. The sun was going down behind the city and the light was coming sideways along the lane, the last of it, amber and low.
"I want to ask you something," said Duarte. "You can say no."
"Okay."
"Let me take a photograph of you."
She laughed. It came out wrong. "No."
"You have taken many photographs of me. Twelve days, I am in the corner of every picture. Do not say no, I have seen your screen." He held out his hand across the gap between the buildings. "Give me the camera."
"Duarte—"
"You said you hate to be looked at. I think it is not true. I think you hate to be looked at by people who are only passing. Who see the face, the eyes, the Japanese girl in the Scottish school." His hand stayed out, steady, over the lane. "I have been looking at you for twelve days, Sata. I am not passing. I have been on this wall for seven months."
She didn't remember deciding. She just found that she had taken the strap from around her neck and was holding the Leica out over the gap, three storeys above the cobbles, and he was taking it, very carefully, the way he lifted an old tile from a wall.
He didn't tell her to smile. He didn't tell her to do anything. He just raised the camera and looked at her through it, and waited.
And she stood there on the narrow balcony in the last of the light, with nothing to hold, nothing to hide behind, nowhere to look but back at him.
It was the strangest feeling of her whole life. It was like being in the sea and feeling the floor drop away beneath her feet. It was like the staircase on Saturday night, the light pouring up the steps the wrong way. She felt the sun on her face and his eyes on her face, and she let them both stay there.
The shutter clicked once.
He lowered the camera and looked at the screen for a long time. Then he turned it around and held it out across the gap so she could see.
In photography there was a word for what happened when you let in too much light: overexposed. The highlights burned out. The edges went white. Detail was lost, people said, as though that was always a failure.
The photograph was overexposed. He had no idea how to use her camera. The sun was flaring in from the left and half her hair had dissolved into gold and there was a white bloom across one cheek where the light had simply overwhelmed everything.
And it was the only photograph of herself that Sata had ever seen in which she looked exactly like who she was.
She didn't say anything. She couldn't. She took the camera back across the lane and held it against her chest.
"Come over," said Duarte. "Or I will come to you. But I am not going to stand on a scaffold all night. I am thirty-eight. My knees."
His flat was on the top floor of the building opposite, the building with the broken tiles, and it was full of them. Tiles on every shelf, in every corner, stacked in boxes on the floor: blue and white, cracked and whole, birds and vines and ships and waves, waiting for walls that might not exist anymore. In the kitchen there was a bench covered with paints and brushes and little glazed test squares, one hundred slightly different blues.
"Which one is right?" she asked, touching them.
"That one." He pointed without looking. "Number sixty-three. It took me nine weeks."
"For one blue?"
"For the right blue," said Duarte, "you wait as long as it takes."
The window was open. Across the lane she could see her own flat, small and dark and neat, her bag by the door. In seven hours a taxi would come.
She turned around. He was standing very close, close enough that she could smell the plaster and the sun on him, close enough that she could see the grey in his hair and a small white scar on his chin she'd never noticed through a lens.
She had looked at him for twelve days. She had never once let herself look at him like this.
He touched her face, very lightly, with the back of his fingers, the way you might touch a surface to find out if it was still warm. She closed her eyes. She felt the evening air come in through the window, and the last of the light against her eyelids, gold going to red going to dark.
"You can still say no," he said, against her hair.
"I know," said Sata, and kissed him.
The shutters swung closed on the last of the light.
The taxi came at four forty-five. She heard it idling in the lane below, its headlights sweeping across the broken tiles.
She dressed in the dark. He was awake; she knew he was. He lay on his back watching her, and didn't ask her to stay, and she loved him a little for that and hated him a little too. At the door she stopped.
"I don't know what this is," she said.
"Neither do I." He sat up. "That is all right. You do not have to know everything in one day. Even the light takes all year."
He got up and went into the kitchen and came back with something wrapped in a page of newspaper. He put it in her hands. It was heavy and flat and cool.
"Do not open it until you are in the sky," he said.
She went down the stairs and across the lane and picked up her bag from her own neat, empty flat, and got into the taxi, and did not look back up at his window, because if she had looked back she would have stayed, and she did not know yet if she was the kind of person who stayed.
At thirty thousand feet, somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, with the sun coming up in a pink line on the left side of the plane, she unwrapped the newspaper.
It was a tile. Old, nineteenth-century, a corner chipped and carefully mended. Blue on white. A small bird with its wings half open, as if it were deciding whether to fly. And the blue of the bird was number sixty-three.
On the back, in pencil, he had written: This one is from my wall. It knows where it belongs. Maybe one day you will too.
She held it in her lap all the way to Edinburgh and didn't cry, because she was Sata, and Sata didn't. But the woman in the window seat next to her passed her a tissue around Bordeaux without a word, and Sata took it.
Edinburgh was raining. Of course it was. It came down soft and grey and endless over the runway, and the light was flat and cool and without any direction at all, and she had never been so glad to see it.
She switched her phone on in the queue for passport control.
THE SUNDAY TABLE 🍳
Emylia: Is she back? Is she BACK
Stacy: Her flight landed 10 mins ago. I'm stalking it.
Emylia: Sata. Brunch tomorrow. You will tell us about Nobody From The Magazine or I will come to your flat and sit on you.
Stacy: Welcome home ❤️
Sata: I'm home.
Sata: His name is Duarte. He restores tiles. I'll tell you everything tomorrow.
Emylia: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
Stacy: SATA. 😭❤️
She was smiling at the screen when a message from her mother came in underneath. Dad's having his tests on Thursday now instead of next month. Nothing to worry about. Come for tea on Sunday? He's tuned the piano for you.
She read it twice. Then a third time. Something cold moved under her breastbone, and she didn't know yet what it was, and she put the phone away.
It buzzed again before she'd reached the front of the queue. A photograph, from a Portuguese number. No text.
It was the staircase. The small square with the fig tree and the broken fountain, the long steps falling away towards the river. Seven ten in the morning. The sun coming straight up the stairs, gold on every stone, pouring up the steps the wrong way.
And at the very edge of the frame, where she had always stood, there was nobody at all.
Underneath, a moment later, three words:
A luz ainda está aqui.
She didn't need a translation. She typed it into her phone anyway, standing in the queue with her passport in one hand and a tile with a bird on it in her bag, just to be sure.
The light is still here.