Page 42

“Tell me the rules.”

“I’ll tell you the rules if I decide to do it. The rules are not a free preview.” She crosses her arms. “But I’ll tell you one of them now, so you can decide if it’s a dealbreaker.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t get to be nice to me when no one’s watching.”

I look at her.

“I mean it,” she says. “If we do this, it’s a performance, and I’m very good at performances, but they only work if everyone stays in their role. So when we’re seen, fine, you can do the — the hand on the back, the looking-at-me thing, whatever sells it. But when it’s just us, we’re not — this isn’t —” she stops, restarts, and I notice she’s using more words than she needs, which I file without knowing why I’m filing it. “We’re colleagues. Business partners. You don’t buy me chai when there’s no one around to see it. Because that’s how people get confused, and I don’t get confused, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

It’s quiet in the back room. The alley light has gone more amber. Somewhere out front the bell rings, a customer, Mormor’s voice rising in greeting.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“That’s a reasonable rule.” I stand up. My shoulder pulls and I ignore it. “Colleagues. Business partners. Got it.”

She studies my face like she’s checking for a catch. I let her. There’s no catch. It’s a reasonable rule, the kind you’d write into a contract, and the fact that something in me notes it as a rule rather than just agreeing to it — the fact that I notice myself filing no chai when no one’s watching like it’s information I might need later — is not a thing I’m going to look at right now.

“I still haven’t said yes,” she says.

“I know.”

“This was a hypothetical conversation about a thing I might not do.”

“Understood.”

“Stop agreeing with me so easily, it’s unnerving.”

“Sorry.”

“And stop apologizing.”

“Sor—” I catch it. “Okay.”

And she laughs.

It’s quick, and she shuts it down fast, like she’s annoyed at it for getting out — but it happened, a real one, lower than her speaking voice and surprised out of her, and I notice that I want to hear it again before I’ve finished noticing that it happened at all. Late, as usual. My awareness running a beat behind the rest of me.

“Go finish your coffee,” she says. “Before Margaret decides you’ve abandoned her and starts narrating it to the customers.”

Out front, Mormor has roped a tourist couple into a forty-minute discussion of local maritime history, which is her favorite trap to spring on unsuspecting visitors, and I sit on the stool behind the counter and finish the coffee, gone cold now, and watch the shop do its thing.

Sloane comes out of the back and resumes her shelving like the conversation never happened. She’s good at that — the clean reset, the face that goes back to neutral. I’d believe it completely if I hadn’t just heard her laugh thirty feet away.

The tourist couple buys two books. Mormor rings them up and tells them about a third they should read and a fourth they shouldn’t, and they leave looking slightly dazed, which is how people generally leave Mormor’s shop.

“Beau.” Mormor turns to me, holding a clipboard. “Be useful. I need you to check the order against this list. The boxes that came in.”

She holds out the clipboard.

And there it is. The thing.

I take the clipboard because not taking it would require an explanation, and I look down at the list, and the page does the thing it does — the lines sliding, the letters not holding still, the work it takes me to make text behave that I’ve spent thirteen years getting good at hiding. I can do it. I just can’t do it fast, and I can’t do it casually, standing at a counter while my grandmother watches, with a list of titles that all blur into the same shape.

“I’ll do it later,” I say. “Let me finish my coffee.”