Chapter 9 #3
She reaches for a book on the display table, a slim volume with a cover dominated by a single striking image: a woman’s face, half in shadow, her expression caught between determination and something that might be fear.
“This might be more interesting,” she says, setting it on the edge of my table.
“If you need a break from property transfers.”
It’s such a simple gesture, a small kindness that makes this place different from the chain coffee shop two streets over. I don’t know how to respond. I pick up the book, turning it over to read the description on the back. “What’s it about?” I ask.
Something changes in her face like she’s excited to talk about it. Her posture straightens slightly. Her voice, when she answers, has a different quality, faster, more animated, her free hand moving in time with her words.
“It’s about a woman whose husband… isn’t who she thought,” she says, her fingers tracing the edge of the cover.
“And it’s less about the betrayal, really, and more about the aftermath.
The mess of it. How you can be furious and heartbroken and still have to get through the day.
” She trails off, as if catching herself.
“The writing is just… honest. About how people can want two opposite things at once.” She gives a small shrug.
“And the ending isn’t tidy. It’s not satisfying, not really. But it feels true.”
“Endings are hard. Especially when they’re honest instead of satisfying.” I reply.
“Exactly,” she says. “That’s it exactly. Do you...?” She gestures at my laptop. “Do you write? Or just translate?”
“Just translate,” I say. “But I read a lot. Probably too much, according to my sister, who says I use books as an avoidance strategy.”
“What are you avoiding?” she asks, the question direct in a way that catches me off-guard.
I consider deflecting, making a joke, changing the subject, all the standard moves for keeping conversations at a safe distance.
But there’s something about the attention she’s giving me, like she’s actually interested in the answer, that makes me say, “Real life, mostly. The messy, complicated version where people are disappointing each other and making mistakes and having to figure out how to keep going anyway.”
She nods, a single movement that acknowledges both the answer and what it cost to give it. “Books are safer,” she says. “Even when they’re messy, someone chose the mess. Decided it meant something.”
“Even when the ending is wrong?” I ask.
“Especially then,” she says. “Those are the ones that stay with you. The ones where the author trusted you enough to tell the truth.”
Twenty minutes into a conversation about literary endings, I realize my phone is forgotten, the manuscript a distant problem.
The usual calculations I make to keep conversations at a polite distance have vanished.
It’s the most present I’ve felt in longer than I want to admit, this complete absorption in what she’s saying.
I’m not thinking about what to say next or how I’m coming across or whether I’m being interesting enough.
I’m just listening, completely and without reservation, to a woman who clearly knows what she thinks about the books she loves.
And I know I am hopelessly lost to this woman.
Elsie excuses herself and I manage to focus on my work, so focused in fact that before I realise it, they are closing. I pack my things and make my way to the door.
“Goodnight,” I say as I pass, the word directed at all of them but somehow my focus stays with Elsie, who looks up with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Night,” she says. “See you tomorrow?”
It’s such a normal question and I am ashamed to say that it warms me inside. “Probably,” I say, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to self-conscious. “If the tax law doesn’t finish me first.”
She laughs, the sound bright in the quiet café. “We’ll have a memorial service,” she promises. “Very dignified. Possibly with cake.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I tell her, and mean it more than I should.
Luca looks up from the table he’s wiping, his expression caught between amusement and something that might be concern. “Goodnight, Window Guy,” he says, the nickname delivered with the emphasis of someone who’s decided it’s funny and is committed to the bit. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
I wave at them both and push out into the cold.
My car sits where I left it this morning. I unlock it with a click that seems too loud in the quiet evening, slide into the driver’s seat, and set Elsie’s book on the passenger seat beside me.
My laptop bag sits in the back. I drove here telling myself I needed a change of scenery for the manuscript, that the café would provide the right balance of noise and human presence. A complete lie. I drove here because I looked for her car in the car park before I even got out of my own.
I pick up the book from the passenger seat, turning it over in my hands.
The cover feels slightly textured under my fingers, the title embossed in letters just raised enough to catch the light.
I open to a random page, read a single paragraph about a woman standing in her kitchen while her life falls apart around her, and close it again.
Somewhere between the cold coffee and the accidental baby diplomacy and the conversation about endings that went twenty minutes longer than it should have, Page & Grounds stopped being a place I worked.
It became something else. Not quite a second home, that would be presumptuous, and also not quite accurate, but not just a café either.
Something in between, a space that exists that’s entirely its own.