Quiet Time
1206 Words
# CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunday started late.
I lay in bed longer than necessary. Not sleeping — just existing in that particular Sunday morning state where the ceiling was as good a thing to look at as anything else and the city outside could manage without me for a while.
The argument was still there when I woke up. I had gone to sleep with it and it had stayed, the way certain things stayed — not loudly, just present, like furniture you kept walking into in the dark.
By ten I was up. Made coffee. Stood at the window with it and looked at Rue Selvaine doing its Sunday thing. A woman walking a dog that was taking its time about everything. A man on a bicycle navigating the cobblestones with more confidence than the cobblestones warranted. The particular unhurried quality of a city that had agreed, collectively, to take the morning slowly.
I stood there for a while.
The apartment was clean. The laptop was closed on the desk where I had left it. The Later folder was still later. The inbox was still unopened.
I put my coat on and went out.
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I walked without a destination for the first twenty minutes. Down Rue Selvaine and left at the bottom, through the stretch of the Aldric District that I liked in the mornings — the older buildings, the narrower streets, the particular quality of Sunday light on old stone that Morvaine did better than anywhere I had lived before.
I was not thinking about the argument. I was not thinking about the restaurant. I was not thinking about any of it.
I was thinking about all of it.
Three months ago my life had a shape I recognised. Translation work, the Deveraux contract, the comfortable architecture of a routine I had built deliberately and maintained without much effort. I had known what my days were for. I had known what I was doing and why.
Now the inbox was closed. The contracts were in a folder called Later. And I was spending my evenings in a restaurant I had taken a temporary job at and somehow never left, working for a man I had argued with loudly enough that his entire floor had gone still, going home in silence, sitting in my coat in the dark.
What had happened to my life.
I ended up at a café on Rue Aldric I had been to before. Small, warm, the kind of place that had been there long enough to stop trying to be anything other than what it was. I ordered coffee and sat at the table by the window and looked at the street.
The thought that kept arriving, plainly and without drama, was that she wanted to leave Oswald's.
Not because of the argument specifically. Not because of him. Just because something about Saturday had made visible a tiredness that had been building for a while — the feeling of someone who had walked into something without fully understanding what they were walking into and had stayed longer than they planned and was now carrying more of it than I had agreed to carry.I could just leave.
Hand in my notice. Go back to translation work when i was ready. Return to the life that had made sense.
She sat with her coffee and considered it. The street outside moved at its Sunday pace. A mother with a pushchair. Two men in coats talking about something that seemed important to them. A teenager on a phone not looking where she was going and somehow arriving safely at her destination anyway.
She was halfway through the coffee when she saw him.
Across the street. Dark jacket. Walking at an easy pace, not hurrying, not looking at the café.
The same face.
She kept her eyes on him without moving. Not staring — just watching the way she watched things, quietly and without making a production of it. He walked the length of the street and turned the corner and was gone.
Third time.
She sat with that for a moment.
First time near Aldric Boulevard. Second time at the market on Colvaine. Now here, on a Sunday morning, a street she had ended up on without planning to.
Three times was not coincidence. She knew that. She had known it since the second time and had filed it as something she was not ready to look at directly and had kept walking.
She looked at it now.
She didn't panic. Panicking required a specific shape of fear and what she had was quieter than that — a careful, measured alertness, the particular stillness of someone whose instincts had been saying something for a while and had finally been listened to.
She finished her coffee. Paid. Left through the side entrance that opened onto the parallel street rather than back onto Rue Aldric.
She walked home through streets she didn't usually take. Not rushing. Her pace even, her hands in her pockets, her face doing nothing that would tell anyone watching her that anything had changed.
Nothing happened. No footsteps behind her. No sense of pursuit. Just Morvaine on a Sunday morning going about its business and her moving through it the way she always moved through things — quietly, without making a show of anything.
She let herself into her building. Up the stairs. Key in the lock.
She locked the door behind her.
Stood in the middle of her apartment.
The quiet of it. The clean surfaces and the closed laptop and the coat on its hook by the door and everything exactly where she had left it when the morning had still been ordinary.
She let herself think it properly. Not the managed version, not the filed version. Just the thing itself.
Something was wrong.
She didn't know what shape it had. She couldn't connect the pieces into anything coherent — the man in the dark jacket, the translation meeting sitting in the back of her mind in the place where she kept things she wasn't examining, the feeling that had been at the edge of her attention for weeks like a word she couldn't quite recall.
But something was wrong.
She made tea. Sat on the couch. Pulled the throw blanket over her legs and held the mug with both hands and looked at the window and the grey Sunday afternoon outside it.
She thought about Tuesday.
She was going to have to go back on Tuesday. Stand at the console and do the job and be in that building and see him and none of Saturday would be addressed because that was not how things worked there and she knew it and she was going to have to be fine with it.
She was going to have to be fine with all of it.
For now.
She drank her tea. Watched the light change in the window as the afternoon moved through itself. The city outside continued without her and she sat in the quiet of her locked apartment and held the mug until it was empty and then held it anyway.
Something was wrong.
She would figure out what.
Just not today.
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*End of Chapter Nineteen*
- Writer
