Chapter 3 What the Mirror Doesnt Say #2
"Dr. Osei said was publishable. You've spent two years being wonderful with other people's children, which you are, I know you are, but at some point — " Her mother paused, then chose a gentler landing.
"I just want to know you have something of your own.
Something with your name on it. Something that doesn't depend on —" She stopped again.
Him, Anya finished silently. Something that doesn't depend on him.
"I have the bakery," Anya said, and immediately knew it was a deflection and could tell from her mother's brief silence that her mother knew it too.
The bakery was her parents' dream — a dream she had helped save, yes, but it was not hers in the originating way, not in the way of something she had chosen because it matched the shape of her.
"Yes," her mother said, carefully. "And I'm grateful for that. Always. But I mean something you built, Anya. For yourself."
Anya looked at the fountain. A small child had gotten away from its parent and was leaning over the edge to study something in the water, utterly absorbed.
"I'm figuring it out," she said.
"I know you are," her mother said. "I just don't want you to — " A pause that contained, Anya knew, an entire generation's worth of hard-won knowledge.
"I've seen women very clever and very capable disappear into someone else's life.
Not because they were forced to. Because it was easier than building. And I don't want that for you."
The small child had been retrieved by the parent and was now being carried away under one arm, shrieking with laughter.
"I'm not disappearing," Anya said.
"I know."
"I'm just — I'm still working out what I'm building toward."
"Sweetheart." Her mother's voice was so warm it was almost painful. "You have always been the most patient person. In a family of very impatient people, you were always the one who could wait. But don't wait so long you forget to start."
They said their goodbyes a few minutes later — her mother sending love, asking about the cheese, reminding her that her cousin's birthday was the fourteenth — and Anya sat with the phone face-down on the bench for a moment after the call ended, watching the market without really seeing it.
Happy isn't a plan.
She turned the ring on her finger without meaning to. It was not a nervous gesture, or she told herself it wasn't — just the slight, automatic adjustment of something still not entirely familiar on her hand. The stone caught the sun: once, twice, a brief bright signal.
She had a First in developmental psychology and an MA in English literature from Goldsmiths — a dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston she'd loved and never used — and an unfinished manuscript and three ideas she'd never quite turned into applications, qualifications she had technically used, she supposed, in the sense that understanding attachment theory made her better at the work she was already doing.
She had a fiancé worth nine figures and two children who were not hers but who had begun to matter in ways that she hadn't entirely accounted for and a key to an opera house in Bavaria and a sourdough starter named Hilde and a basket of dahlias and a life that was, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.
She had no idea what she was building.
She picked up the basket and went to finish the shopping.
She bought the dark rye, because the Bauernbrot was a project and not a certainty and she was not above backup bread.
She bought a small jar of the smoky paprika she'd been using in the chicken stew Cassian had asked for twice now with the slightly too-careful nonchalance of someone who wanted it a third time but didn't want to seem predictable.
She bought a paper bag of the spiced nuts from the roasted-almond stall because they smelled extraordinary and she didn't need a reason beyond that.
She walked the length of the market and back, letting the morning do its work, letting the cobblestones and the bright cold air and the ordinary commerce of a Tuesday press against her mother's words until they settled into their proper place — present but not overwhelming, the way important truths usually were.
By the time she turned back up the lane toward the estate, she had decided something, or the beginning of something: she was going to look at her thesis again. Not to do anything with it, not yet. Just to look.
It was a small decision. It felt, unexpectedly, enormous.
The lane back up to the opera house was steeper than it appeared from the bottom, and she shifted the basket to her other arm and took her time.
The kestrel was gone from the gatepost. The mist in the valley had burned off completely.
The light had moved into its mid-morning clarity, the kind that shows everything.
She went around to the kitchen entrance, which was the door she always used now — the side door with the lower step and the iron boot scraper shaped like a dachshund, which she privately found delightful and had never mentioned because it seemed like the sort of thing you needed to maintain a certain dignity about.
Cassian was in the kitchen.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was the coffee.
He was making it with the Moka pot — the small Italian stovetop one that lived on the second shelf and came out only when Mrs. Adler had the week off or when he was, for reasons Anya had slowly learned to read, in a particular kind of mood.
The La Cornue range kind of mood. The I am doing something simple and slow because I cannot do anything about the complicated thing mood.
He was standing at the stove with his back to her, both hands braced on the counter's edge, watching the pot as though it required supervision.
He had not heard her come in.
She set the basket down quietly on the island and watched him for a moment.
He was in his work clothes — dark trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm — but without the jacket, without the studied composure he wore in most rooms like a second skin.
From behind, she could see the slight tension in the line of his shoulders, the particular quality of stillness that was not relaxed but held.
"Hey," she said.
He turned. And there was that fraction of a second — she was good at fractions of a second; it was occupational training, really, years of reading small faces for the signals that preceded the large feelings — where his expression settled from something into something else, like a door closing softly.
"You're back," he said.
"You noticed the bread going out this morning?"
"I noticed the dough under the cloth. I assumed you hadn't given up."
She began unpacking the basket — the rye, the cheese, the paprika, the nuts. "I haven't given up. Hilde is very reliable."
"Hilde."
"The starter."
A pause. The Moka pot began to hiss. "You've named the bread starter," he said, not quite a question.
"She came with a name. I've merely maintained it." Anya looked up from the basket. "Are you all right?"
"Yes."