Chapter 5 First Turbulence #2
So she said: "Alright." And she meant it as the beginning of something rather than its end, and she thought he probably understood this, and his thumb moved across her knuckles again, and the white sky held them.
* * *
Marchmont Street in November was exactly as she remembered it.
Anya stood on the pavement outside the bookshop — Finch & Atterbury, lettered in modest gold on a dark green fascia — and breathed in the smell of a city she had grown up alongside without ever quite feeling she fully belonged to: old stone and cold air and something fried from the café two doors down and the particular exhaust note of a No.
91 bus accelerating past the Renoir. She had not been back since Bavaria had become home, and she had not known, until this moment, how much of London she had been carrying in her chest like a pebble — something that pressed against the underside of everything but that she never directly addressed because addressing it felt like ingratitude.
She was not ungrateful. She was not homesick, exactly. She was something in between — a person who had moved toward a life she genuinely wanted and had not yet fully reconciled with the self she had been before she wanted it.
Cassian had dropped her here because she'd asked, had kissed her temple at the car door with his hand still holding the frame in that way he had, economical and warm at once, and said he would be an hour.
She had watched the Bentley pull away and then stood on the kerb for a moment longer than necessary, orienting herself.
She went into Finch & Atterbury.
The bell above the door was brass and quiet.
The shop smelled of what all good bookshops smell of — dust and old cloth and the particular sweetness of paper that has been sitting still for a long time.
The man behind the counter was in his sixties, white-haired, reading glasses on a chain, and he looked up when she entered with the expression of someone who was genuinely pleased to see a customer rather than merely professionally obligated to appear so.
"Good afternoon," he said.
"Good afternoon." She moved toward the shelves because that was what you did in bookshops, it was the correct grammar of the space, and she ran her fingers along the spines in the poetry section without reading the titles because she was not really here for poetry.
She was here because this was the street where, some months ago, she had sat in a friend's flat drinking C?tes du Rh?ne and laughed without calculation and felt briefly, uncomplicated-ly herself.
And she was here because this shop belonged to Cassian — she had known this for some time, he had told her in the matter-of-fact way he occasionally disclosed things about himself that should have been surprising — and standing inside it felt like standing inside a part of him that he hadn't engineered for effect.
He had bought it, she suspected, because he could not bear the thought of it closing.
Because there were things, even for Cassian Sterling, that money protected when he couldn't protect them any other way.
She thought about this. About the man who bought a bookshop on a quiet London street so it wouldn't disappear. About the man who pressed a watch crown with his thumb at a Bavarian airfield and did not explain why. About the difference between those two things and what the difference told her.
She bought a slim collection of Elizabeth Bishop — the only woman who had ever made her feel that uncertainty was not a flaw but a form of precision — and the white-haired man wrapped it in tissue paper that she did not ask for and she thanked him and went back out into the cold.
She walked to the end of the street and back.
She looked in the window of the café. She watched two women argue cheerfully over a shared umbrella at the junction.
She thought about who she had been when she first walked into Cassian Sterling's townhouse with her carefully ironed navy blazer and her paper coffee cup and her absolute certainty that none of this would last. She thought about who she was now: a woman who had moved to Bavaria and made bread and loved two children and loved their father with a depth that still occasionally surprised her, like finding a room in a familiar house she hadn't opened yet.
She thought: I am not the woman who waits to lose things anymore.
And then: so what do I do with the thing I am fairly sure he is not telling me?
The Bishop collection was warm in her coat pocket, slightly too large for it, the corner pressing into her hip.
She stood on the kerb and looked at the middle distance — the green frontage of the shop, the warm yellow light inside — and she thought with a kind of clear, steady deliberateness: whatever it is, we will handle it.
She thought: I am not afraid of the thing itself.
I am afraid of the distance. The glass. She thought: I've been through that glass once.
I will not go through it twice without saying something.
She heard the Bentley before she saw it — the particular low frequency of that engine, which she had ridden in enough times now to recognise like a voice.
It pulled up to the kerb with its usual unhurried authority and the rear door opened, and Cassian stepped out rather than waiting for it to be opened for him, which was a thing he always did and which she had always quietly loved.
He looked at her first. Not at the bookshop, not at the street — at her. His coat collar was turned up against the wind and his hair had been pulled slightly askew by it and he looked, for a moment, simply like a man standing on a cold street in November, ordinary and real and hers.
"How was it?" she asked.
"Fine," he said. He reached her and stood close, the way he did when he was navigating between the public version of himself and the private one — using her proximity as a kind of disambiguation. "How was the street?"
"I bought a book." She patted her coat pocket. "From a shop someone clearly bought to save."
His mouth curved. "He's been running it for thirty years," he said. "His daughter wants him to retire. He won't." A pause. "The shop is his argument."
She looked at him. "What's his argument against retiring?"