A Party. Definitely.
1266 Words
# CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The weekend was quiet.
I kept it that way deliberately. Stayed home mostly. Did small things — cleared the apartment properly for the first time in two weeks, finished a book I had been halfway through since September, cooked an actual meal on Sunday which I ate at the table like a person who had their life together.
I did not open my laptop.
I did not think about the room on the third floor.
I did not think about the two men at the far end of the table and the German that had moved between them like something that had always existed and had simply been waiting for the right moment to become a problem.
My grandmother used to speak to me in German.
The thought arrived on Sunday evening while I was washing up — unhurried, the way thoughts arrived when you weren't trying to have them. Her house outside the city. The kitchen that smelled like something always cooking. The two years my mother and I had lived with her, years that existed in my memory in a particular quality of warmth and smallness.
She had spoken German because it was her language and her house and she had earned the right to speak it however she pleased. My mother had managed passably. I had absorbed it the way children absorbed things sitting at that kitchen table — without studying, without trying, the language settling into me like weather settling into a place.
I never listed it anywhere. Never used it professionally. It was her language. Kitchen language. The language of soup on cold days and *Liebling* and hands I still remembered even now.
I washed the dishes.
Did not think about it further.
By Tuesday I was back at my desk. The NGO project, the smaller assignments, the ordinary architecture of my working life. I replied to two emails I had been avoiding. Moved the new client enquiry to a folder called Later and told myself I would look at it next week when I had more capacity.
I was fine.
---
Bree called on Tuesday morning.
"Are you working today?" she said.
"Not until this evening." Oswald's.
"Come out. Have you ever been to Harlow during the day? They do a lunch thing apparently."
I looked at my laptop. The NGO document open on the screen. The cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I had been staring at for twenty minutes.
"Fine," I said. "What time."
"Noon."
"Fine."
---
Harlow during the day was a different animal from Harlow on a Saturday night.
The darkness was the same — the low ceilings, the booths along the walls, the bar that ran the length of the room. But the energy was entirely different. Quieter. A handful of tables occupied, people in the particular relaxed posture of a weekday lunch that wasn't really about the food. Music at a lower volume. The bar staff moving without urgency, restocking, existing at their own pace.
Bree and I took the same booth we always took.
She ordered something. I ordered something. We talked — about the design project which was nearly finished, about Jenson which she mentioned briefly and I did not push on because it was Bree's and I had learned to wait. About nothing in particular and everything in passing the way good afternoons sometimes went.
It was good. The kind of afternoon that existed for its own sake.
And then at some point I saw him.
He was at the far end of the bar. Not performing being there — just there, a drink in front of him, speaking to someone beside him the way he spoke to everyone. Dark clothing. That quality he carried everywhere, the way of occupying a space like the space had always expected him.
I looked away.
Looked back.
It was him. I was almost certain it was him. But almost certain was not the same as certain and I had been almost certain before in this same building and had spent the following week telling myself it was a coincidence.
Bree was saying something about a fabric delivery.
"Sorry," I said. "One moment."
She looked at me.
"Just — one moment."
He had moved. While I was looking at Bree he had moved away from the bar, toward the back of the room, up the stairs that led to the upper level.
I told myself I was just going to confirm it.
That was all. Just look. Confirm. Come back down.
---
The upper level of Harlow was quieter than the ground floor. A few tables, a small balcony area looking onto the street, some rooms that seemed to be private spaces — doors half open, half closed. The particular feel of a space that saw more life in the evenings.
I moved through it slowly.
First room. Empty.
Second door — storage.
Third door, slightly ajar.
I pushed it open.
He was standing at the window looking onto the street below. He hadn't heard me. Or if he had he hadn't turned.
I stood in the doorway.
This was him. Not almost certain. Certain. The set of his shoulders, the dark clothing, the stillness of him. Callan Constantine Oswald at a bar on a Tuesday afternoon looking at a street through a window like he had every reason to be exactly where he was.
I had confirmed it.
I should leave.
I stepped back.
"Scarlett."
I stopped.
He hadn't turned around. Still looking at the window. His voice exactly the way it always was — even, unhurried, like the world moved at whatever pace he decided.
I stood there.
He turned.
The expression on his face was not the dining room version. Not the office version. Something quieter. And underneath the quiet, the beginning of something that on anyone else I might have called amusement.
"I'm not — I wasn't—" I started.
He waited.
"I'm here with a friend," I said. "I was just looking around. This is a bar. People look around. I'm not stalking you."
He looked at me.
"Okay," he said.
A pause.
"A party. Definitely."
I felt my face do something I did not authorize it to do.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I've got to go."
I turned. Walked out the door. Into the corridor.
"F—" The word came out quiet. To no one. Just the corridor and me and the particular quality of wanting to be somewhere else immediately.
The door opened behind me.
"F—?" His voice. Right there. "Who? Scarlett?"
I stopped.
Turned around.
He was standing in the doorway with that face — the almost-smile that arrived and left before you could catch it except this time it was staying considerably longer than usual.
"You're weird," I said.
And walked. Fast. Down the stairs, across the ground floor, straight to the booth where Bree was sitting with her drink and the patient expression of someone who had watched me leave and return in under five minutes and had already drawn her own conclusions.
"I'm leaving," I said.
"Okay," she said.
She picked up her bag without being asked. We left.
On the street outside I walked slightly faster than necessary and Bree walked beside me at her usual pace and said nothing for almost a full minute.
Then: "That was him."
Not a question.
"I need to be at work by six," I said.
"It's one forty-five," she said.
"I need to prepare."
"Zia."
"I'm fine."
"Okay," she said.
We walked.
---
*End of Chapter Fourteen*
- Writer
