Lucas tried to read the book that very night. He sat on the narrow bed in his rented room—a small space above Mrs. Marta's bakery, where the smell of bread seeped into everything before dawn—and opened “Songs for No One” to the first page. He read the first verse. Read it again. Read it a third time. The words were all there, whole, but his mind was somewhere else. In a corridor of cramped books. In an accidental touch against dark green leather. In a laugh that had been born at the same time as hers, as if rehearsed.
He closed the book and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling didn't help.
Over the next two days, Lucas taught classes on Drummond to students who preferred their phones, graded tests with the red pen that always stopped working halfway through a sentence, and walked along the waterfront in Serena Village at the end of the afternoon, when the wind grew cold and the lighthouse began to blink. He did all of it with the distracted competence of someone following the day's script while his mind wrote another one. Because the truth—and Lucas knew how to recognize inconvenient truths; he was a poet, after all—was that he wanted to go back to the bookstore. And he didn't know how to come up with a reason that wasn't ridiculous.
On the third day, he came up with a ridiculous reason anyway.
The doorbell creaked. The same bronze whine. Clara was at the counter this time, with a pencil tucked behind her ear and her imaginary-cover notebook open in front of her. She looked up and recognized him before deciding whether she wanted to show that she recognized him.
—The poet, she said, and the word came out with a half smile she hadn't planned.
—The book. Lucas held up the dark green volume as if presenting a credential. —I came to return it.
—We're not a library.
—I know. But I thought it belonged on that shelf more than on my nightstand.
Clara tilted her head, studying him with that direct frankness that belonged only to her—the kind of look that didn't pretend not to be looking.
—Did you read it?
—I did.
—And?
Lucas thought for a moment. Really thought, not the automatic way people answered “I liked it” to end a conversation.
—There's a verse in the middle, he said slowly, that goes: “I write for no one because no one is the only one who listens without trying to fix things.” I kept thinking about it all night.
Clara set down her pencil. Not because she needed her hands—she set it down because that sentence deserved her full attention.
—Why?
—Because I think that's what we look for. Someone who will listen without trying to fix things.
The silence that followed wasn't awkward. It was the kind of silence that happens when two people discover they're thinking the same thing and become a little afraid of it.
Clara took the book from his hands. Their fingers didn't touch this time, but they passed close enough for both of them to notice that they hadn't touched.
—I'll put it back on the shelf, she said. —But if you want, you can come read here. Thomas doesn't mind. There's an armchair in the back room that no one uses.
—An armchair in the back room of an antiquarian bookstore, Lucas repeated, as if testing the sound of the phrase. —It sounds like the kind of place where you disappear from the world.
—It's exactly the kind of place where you disappear from the world.
She led him to the back room. The armchair was worn burgundy velvet, with a ripped armrest and a blanket folded over the back. It stood beside a window overlooking an alley where an orange cat slept on a stack of old newspapers. The light was different there—filtered and warm, the kind that made the hours seem slower.
Lucas sat down. Clara went back to the counter. And for the next hour, he read and she drew, and neither of them said a word, and that nothing was the most comfortable conversation Lucas had had in months.
When he got up to leave, he passed the counter and stopped.
—Can I come back tomorrow?
Clara didn't look up from the notebook. But her pencil stopped moving.
—The armchair isn't going anywhere.
Lucas left. The doorbell creaked. The fall wind was colder than it had been the week before, and the sky had that shade of purple that appeared only in those precise minutes between day and night.
At the counter, Clara turned the page of her notebook and looked at the drawing she'd made over the past hour. It was an imaginary book cover. It had a title she didn't remember choosing, written in thin letters at the center of the page:
“Songs for Someone.”
In the back room of the bookstore, Thomas watered a pot of violets that didn't need water and smiled like someone who knew exactly what was happening, but understood that some stories needed to tell themselves.