Bonus Scene （Marcus’s POV）
BONUS SCENE (MARCUS'S POV)
THE DAY HE KNEW. THE MOMENT HE STOPPED HIDING.
THE FIRST DAY
The shop was quiet. It was always quiet now.
Two years since Sarah died, and I'd gotten used to the silence. Built my life around it, actually—wake up, open the shop, sell antiques to people who mostly just wanted to browse, close the shop, go upstairs, eat dinner alone, go to sleep. Repeat until death.
It was fine. It was working.
The radio was playing Coltrane. It was always Coltrane, or Miles Davis, or Duke Ellington. The radio had opinions about jazz—strong ones—and in the thirty years I'd owned it, it had never played anything else. Sarah used to joke that we had the most pretentious haunted object in California.
I was cataloguing a shipment of Victorian mourning jewelry—appropriate, given my general outlook on life—when the door burst open and chaos walked in.
She was disheveled. Wild-eyed. Wearing yesterday's clothes and what appeared to be only one sock. She clutched her phone like it was a live grenade, and she looked around my shop with the desperate expression of someone seeking sanctuary from something she couldn't name.
My first thought: The shop is closed. The sign clearly says closed. Can this woman not read?
My second thought, when I noticed her phone had stopped buzzing the moment she crossed the threshold: What the hell?
My third thought, watching her face shift from panic to confusion to relief as she realized the silence: Oh. That's what alive looks like.
I'd forgotten.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
I hadn't done anything. The shop had done something—or whatever Sarah had left behind, the residue of twenty-eight years of collecting objects that "hummed." But I wasn't about to explain that to a stranger who looked like she might shatter if I said the wrong thing.
"I didn't do anything," I said instead. "Also, the shop is closed."
She ignored this completely. Held up her phone, showing me a screen full of faces, matches, notifications. Started babbling about men following her, disco enthusiasts, someone named Greg with a leisure suit and strong opinions about cosmic vibrations.
"There's a man outside who keeps calling me 'foxy mama,'" she said, like this was a normal thing to tell a stranger. "He tried to pay for coffee with a Susan B. Anthony dollar. I think he might actually be from 1978."
The radio crackled. It sounded almost like laughter.
"Your radio's broken," she said.
"It's not broken. It's just opinionated."
"About what?"
"Jazz, mostly."
On cue, the radio shifted from Coltrane to something that sounded suspiciously cheerful. I frowned at it. It had never done that before.
I should have asked her to leave. I should have gone back to my mourning jewelry and my silence and my carefully constructed isolation.
Instead, I heard myself say: "Tea's in the back. You look like you need it."
Sarah would have laughed at me. Two years of refusing to let anyone in, and all it takes is one desperate woman with a possessed phone and a missing sock?
But Sarah wasn't here to laugh. And the woman—Diane, she said her name was Diane—looked at me with such raw gratitude when I handed her a cup of tea that something cracked in my chest.
Something I'd thought was permanently sealed.
She came back the next day. And the next. And the next.
I told myself it was just because the shop made her phone stop buzzing. Told myself she was using me—using the space, using the quiet, using whatever strange power had seeped into these walls over the years.
But she asked questions. Real questions. About the objects, about the shop, about San Francisco. About Sarah.
No one asked about Sarah anymore. They either avoided the topic entirely or treated her like a tragedy—something to be pitied, mourned, moved on from. Diane asked about her like she was a person. Like she mattered.
And she laughed at my jokes. Actual laughter, not polite chuckles. When I told her about Victorian mourning hair jewelry, she dropped a brooch like it had bitten her and shouted "THERE'S A DEAD PERSON'S HAIR IN THIS?" loud enough to startle the music box into playing.
"It's keratin," I said. "It's no more 'remains' than your fingernail clippings."
"I'm not wearing my fingernail clippings as jewelry!"
"More's the pity. Very on-trend for the 1870s."
She stared at me. I stared back, completely straight-faced.
And then she laughed—a real laugh, surprised out of her. I'd forgotten what it felt like to make someone laugh. To be something other than the sad widower everyone tiptoed around.
"You're messing with me," she said.
"Only slightly. The hair is real. The trend analysis is accurate. The suggestion that you should start a fingernail jewelry line is my own contribution."
"I hate you."
"No, you don't."
She didn't. That was becoming a problem.
For both of us.
THE RADIO BETRAYS ME
The morning she first came to the shop, the radio played jazz. Normal. Expected.
The next morning, it played jazz with what I can only describe as enthusiasm. Still acceptable.
By day three, it had started incorporating what I suspected were love songs disguised as jazz standards. I chose not to examine this too closely.
Then came the day the app matched us.
I was in the shop, minding my own business, when my laptop—which I use exclusively for inventory and strongly-worded emails to suppliers—suddenly displayed her face. Diane's face. On what was clearly a dating app I had never installed.
Your Perfect Match! the screen announced. Diane Martinez, 47, Fairhaven. She likes: Wine, cats, and avoiding commitment!
"What," I said flatly.
The radio crackled and launched into Barry Manilow.
"Mandy."
I stared at it. In fifteen years, this radio had never played anything but jazz. It had opinions. Strong ones. It had once refused to play for three days after I made a disparaging comment about bebop.
And now it was playing Barry Manilow.
"This is a betrayal," I told it.
The radio ignored me and continued crooning about sending a woman away.
I texted the number on the app—her number, apparently, because this nightmare had no boundaries. Why is your face on my laptop. I don't date. I don't WANT to date. What is happening.
The song ended. Started again. From the beginning.
Forty-five minutes. I timed it. Forty-five minutes of "Mandy" while I paced my shop, questioned my life choices, and wondered if it was possible to exorcise a radio.
By the time she showed up at my door with the assembled chaos of her magical entourage, I was a broken man. A broken man who had Barry Manilow stuck in his head and would never forgive the universe for this indignity.
"The radio has opinions about jazz," I told Liam later, while the witches strategized in the other room. "It's never played anything but jazz. And now suddenly it's Barry Manilow and I don't know who I am anymore."
He nodded sympathetically. "Cassie's magic set my curtains on fire once."
"That sounds preferable."
"It wasn't."
We stared at our tea in companionable silence. Two men who had been perfectly content in their isolation, now dragged into magical chaos by women who apparently couldn't leave well enough alone.
"It's not going to stop, is it?" I asked.
"No," he said. "It's really not."
THE ALMOST-KISS
I wasn't going to touch her.
I was COMMITTED to not touching her. She was a woman who came to my shop for the quiet. A woman with her own mess to sort through. A woman who had forty-seven first dates under her belt and clearly wasn't looking for number forty-eight.
Also, the radio had started playing what I can only describe as "romantic jazz," and I refused to give it the satisfaction.
But then she said: "When I'm with you, I don't want to run. And that's never happened before."
And I recognized myself in her. The same fear, different shape. The same walls, different architecture.
When I touched her face, it wasn't a decision. It was gravity.
She was leaning closer. I was leaning closer. The radio had shifted to something slow and deliberate—it approved, apparently, which should have been my first warning sign.
I could kiss her. I wanted to kiss her. For the first time in two years, I wanted something other than silence.
Her phone screamed.
Not buzzed—SCREAMED. A digital shriek that shattered the moment like glass. We jerked apart, and I watched the chaos flood back into her eyes—the notifications cascading, the matches multiplying, some man in a leisure suit pounding on my door yelling about cosmic vibrations.
"GROOVY LADY!" Greg shouted through the glass. "THE COSMIC VIbrATIONS ARE VERY INSISTENT!"
Of course they were. Of course the universe had sent a man in polyester to interrupt the first genuine emotion I'd felt in two years. Of course.
I felt myself closing up. Felt the walls going back into place, brick by careful brick. Safer this way. Easier.
"Friend of yours?" I asked, and heard the coldness in my own voice.
"He's from the app. From the magic. He's not—I don't want—"
"You should probably deal with that."
She looked at me with something like desperation. "I was going to kiss you."
Were you? I wanted to ask. Or were you going to find a reason to run, like you always do?
But that wasn't fair. The interruption wasn't her fault. The timing wasn't her fault.
The disco enthusiast currently pressing his face against my window was, however, absolutely grounds for murder.
"Then I guess we'll never know," I said. "If you would have gone through with it."
She left. Greg followed, chattering about mix tapes. The radio went silent—actually silent, for the first time since she'd walked into my life.
I stood in my empty shop and thought: I'm not going to survive this. I'm going to fall in love with a woman who doesn't know how to stay, and a man in a leisure suit is going to be the reason I die alone.
THE TWO DAYS
She texted. Four messages, the night before she showed up at my door.
I'm sorry about Greg.
Can we talk?
Please.