The rain came in off the water around half past ten, and Evander's collarbone began to itch.
He reached up and pressed two fingers against the collar of his shirt — not scratching, just pressing, the way you would lay a palm on an old bruise to confirm it was still there — and then he went back to sorting the morning's donations.
Someone had given them three boxes of travel memoirs. Someone always gave them travel memoirs. Evander worked through them with the resignation of a man who has understood the nature of other people's enthusiasms and made his peace with it, stacking them into the trolley with his left hand while his right maintained occasional supervisory contact with his collarbone, which had the manners of an injury that considered itself insufficiently acknowledged.
Outside, the rain made the street go silver. Merrow Lane was narrow enough that when the gutters filled, they ran in one continuous sheet from the bookshop's awning to the fishmonger's three doors down, and the whole lane smelled for the next hour of salt and wet wool and the faintly metallic quality the air got when it came off the harbor in winter. Evander had lived in Varne for four years. He had worked at Helwick & Strand, Secondhand Books and Curios, for three of them. He knew this smell the way he knew the particular complaint of the third step on the flat's staircase, and the hour at which Ptolemy would begin his campaign for supper, and the exact angle of winter light through the shop's east-facing window that made reading the spines in the antiquarian section impossible between eleven and noon. He had assembled this knowledge deliberately, the way someone might assemble a proof — accumulating the components of a life until it became self-evidential. This is where I live. These are the things I know. This is enough.
Ptolemy was on the returns desk.
This was not, technically, permitted. It was also utterly pointless to object to, and Evander had arrived at the third year of a working relationship in which he and the cat maintained a productive fiction: Evander would position a stack of reference books in front of Ptolemy as a nominal barrier, and Ptolemy would sit directly behind it, and the moral responsibility was thereby distributed in a manner both parties found acceptable. The cat was a large, grey, deeply skeptical animal with the expression of someone who has read the same customer complaints you have and drawn harsher conclusions. He had been a gift, technically — Cael had found him in a bin behind the faculty building and had said, with the confidence of someone certain of their own benevolence, that Evander clearly needed company, and Evander had said that he had not asked for it, and they had argued about this for twenty minutes in the rain while Ptolemy sat in a takeaway box and waited for the matter to resolve itself.
That had been three years ago. Ptolemy had since developed, in Cael's considered opinion, something that could fairly be described as a personality.
Evander put the last of the travel memoirs in the trolley and pushed it toward the travel section, which was at the back of the shop in a room that also housed large-format art books and, inexplicably, a single shelf of accountancy textbooks that had been there when Evander arrived and which Marta — his employer, Helwick & Strand's managing half — claimed were part of the shop's 'institutional character.' No one had ever bought one. Evander had stopped questioning it in the way he had stopped questioning several aspects of Helwick & Strand, including the ship-in-a-bottle on the front desk, the policy on cats, and the handwritten sign in the back office that read DO NOT SELL THE ATLASES TO HIM AGAIN that referenced a customer history Evander had never been able to reconstruct.
He liked the shop. This seemed worth noting, even just to himself, because he was not always certain that the things he had selected for his life were things he genuinely liked or things that were simply the right size to fill the shapes he needed filled. The bookshop fit. The smell of it — old paper and binding glue and something faintly vanilla from the aging, which he'd looked up once and found was called lignin degradation, which was either romantic or depressing depending on your threshold — the smell had gotten into his jacket and he noticed it sometimes on his way home, and it was not an unpleasant thing to carry.
The door opened at twenty past eleven, letting in a gust of harbor air and Mr. Featherwick.
Evander had a policy about customer names. He did not learn them unless volunteered directly, because learning them would suggest an investment in the continuity of these relationships that he preferred to keep slightly theoretical. Mr. Featherwick had volunteered his name on the third visit, along with his occupation (retired something administrative), his opinion of Varne's parking situation (emphatic), and the fact that he read one Russian novel per month, which he undertook with the seriousness of someone completing a subscription they intended to get the full value from.
'Holt,' said Mr. Featherwick, by way of greeting.
Evander said, 'Mr. Featherwick,' and came back to the front of the shop, because what followed would require some navigation.
'I've finished the Dos-toy-ev-sky,' said Mr. Featherwick.
'Dostoevsky,' Evander said, not unkindly.
'Yes, that's what I said.'
It wasn't, but they had been at this for fourteen months and Evander had reached the stage of acceptance that his secondary literature teachers had probably wished he'd reached with several other things earlier in life. 'Which one?'
'The Brothers one.'
'The Brothers Karamazov,' Evander confirmed.
'Long,' said Mr. Featherwick.
'Yes.'
'Lot of arguing about God.'
'That's one way to put it.'
'What's next?'
This was the part that required navigation, because Mr. Featherwick's relationship to Russian literature was enthusiastic and adversarial in roughly equal measure, and recommending the right next volume was a precise undertaking. Too long and he would return dissatisfied and report that there had, again, been a great deal of arguing about God or suffering or Russia, as though these were unexpected features rather than the foundational subject matter. Too short and he felt he had not received the full monthly value. Evander had steered him through Turgenev last autumn with moderate success. There had been an incident with Tolstoy. They did not discuss the incident with Tolstoy.
'Try Bulgakov,' Evander said. 'The Master and Margarita. It has the devil in it, which is different from the arguing about God.'
'The devil,' Mr. Featherwick said, appearing to weigh this. 'Is it long?'
'Reasonably.'
'Does it resolve?'
'Definitionally no,' said Evander, 'but in a satisfying way.'
Mr. Featherwick purchased the Bulgakov and left, apparently satisfied, and Evander rang it through the register and stood for a moment in the sudden quiet.
The rain had let up, which meant the itch in his collarbone had resolved into the lower-grade awareness it maintained when the weather was simply grey rather than actively wet. He didn't think about it anymore than that. He used to, when he'd first come to Varne — used to catch himself pressing his fingers to it in the street, self-conscious, the way you are conscious of a thing when you are still in the process of forgetting it. He wasn't still in that process. He had, after four years and a great deal of deliberate application, arrived at the far side of it, which was not forgetting exactly but was something that functioned like forgetting: the itch happened, he registered it, he continued with whatever he was doing, and there was no weight behind the noticing.
He continued with what he was doing, which was the delivery manifest for Wednesday's estate sale lots and a cup of tea gone slightly past optimal temperature. He had views about tea temperature and had learned not to express them, since Cael found them disproportionate and Marta found them 'very Evander,' which was a category she deployed with affection and which he had agreed to accept in that spirit.
The afternoon passed in the way good working afternoons pass when you are doing work you have chosen and are adequate at: a graduate student looking for secondary sources on something architectural, a woman with a double stroller who wanted anything waterproof and brief, a pair of teenagers who drifted in out of the rain and spent forty minutes in the fiction section and bought nothing and left a smell of wet umbrella behind them. Evander pulled the Wednesday manifest into approximate order, turned down a donation of twenty-three copies of the same self-help title from a man who gave no explanation and required none, and at three o'clock made a second cup of tea and was, for a period of perhaps fifteen minutes, simply sitting in the good quiet of the shop with Ptolemy on the returns desk and the rain resuming on the window and nothing requiring his immediate attention.
He was, on balance, fine.
This was not a small thing. He had spent considerable effort arriving at it. He noted it the way he noted the collarbone — without surprise, without the narrative weight that once would have pressed around it from all sides — and drank his tea, and at five o'clock began to close up.
The closing routine was eight minutes if he was not interrupted. He had timed this. Marta found this particular fact 'very Evander' to a degree that she had given up commenting on, which he appreciated. He turned the sign, locked the front, dimmed the displays, checked the back windows, covered the antiquarian shelf with its cloth — an original instruction from Helwick himself, who had retired to somewhere coastal three years ago and whose institutional knowledge survived mainly in Marta's secondhand reports and in the handwritten signs that papered the back office and which Evander had come to think of as a kind of archaeological record.
Ptolemy dropped from the returns desk, stretched with the full-body commitment of an animal that has been working hard all day doing nothing, and walked to the back door with the expectation of someone who has opinions about promptness.
'I know,' said Evander.
He let the cat out into the back passage, pulled on his jacket, picked up the manifest for tomorrow, and walked the four streets to the flat in the manner of a man who knew this particular journey well enough to conduct it on something less than full conscious attention — which was fine, because the parts of him that ran below full conscious attention had, over four years, been persuaded that these four streets were simply four streets and required nothing from him beyond reasonable awareness of traffic. He was, on balance and by most measurable standards, a person going home after work.
The flat was on the third floor of a building that had been a granary in a previous century and still smelled faintly of something grain-adjacent in warm weather. Evander had the smaller of the two flats — Cael had the larger one across the landing, which he had furnished with the particular confidence of someone whose aesthetic had not yet resolved into a single direction and who was fine with that, which Evander was not, particularly, but had arrived at an accommodation with. Cael's door had a hand-painted sign on it that said INQUIRIES WELCOME and Evander's had nothing, which was also, he was aware, a statement of a kind.
Cael's door was closed and the flat beyond it quiet, which meant Cael was at the university or the pub or at Remi's, who was a girl Cael had been carefully not mentioning for three weeks in the way that meant he was thinking about mentioning her. Evander had decided to wait this out. He had views on the subject of what Cael's personal life required from him, which was mostly to be ready to make tea at the relevant juncture and to refrain from commentary.
He let himself into the flat, fed Ptolemy, who had beaten him home by some mechanism Evander had stopped trying to understand, and made dinner with the radio on low — news, which he listened to with the practiced partial attention of someone who wants to stay informed and also does not want the day's events to achieve weight. He ate at the kitchen table. The flat was warm and smelled of cooking and the faint persistent quality of old timber, and Ptolemy arranged himself on the second chair with the expression of someone willing to supervise.
After dinner he washed up, sat down with a book he had been reading in the approximately twenty-five minutes between finishing everything else and the point at which he could reasonably sleep, and read.
The knock came at half past eight.
Not Cael — Cael had a key and a habit of announcing himself before he used it, on the grounds that Evander had once reacted to an unannounced entrance in a way Cael described as 'extremely alarming' and which Evander declined to comment on further. This knock was different: three times, evenly spaced, with the particular quality of someone who has decided to knock and will wait as long as required without knocking again.
He knew that knock. It was not a knock you forgot.
He stood up with the careful deliberateness of a person who is choosing not to feel what is occurring in his chest, walked to the door, and opened it.
Headmistress Corva Voss stood in the hallway of a Varne granary-conversion building in a coat damp from the rain, her grey hair precisely as he remembered it, her expression composed in the particular way of a person who has been composing it for some time. She was holding a paper cup of tea from the place on the corner.
She had brought it herself.
Of course she had.
'Evander,' she said. 'I hope this isn't a terrible time.'
He looked at her. He looked at the tea. He thought, with a clarity that surprised him only in that it contained no surprise at all, that seven years was apparently exactly long enough to believe you had made something permanent.
'Headmistress,' he said.
And then, because there was nothing else to do and no version of this that benefited from standing in a doorway, he stepped aside and let her in.