Chương 33: “Lauren On A Sunday”

Sunday. June at Cecile's. Lauren at the kitchen table with her bookkeeping. She worked for two hours. Then she made coffee and sat back and looked at the ceiling for a while, which was something Vorrath had noticed she did when she had given herself permission to stop. She did not do it often. She was bad at stopping. She had things to do always, a permanent architecture of tasks between herself and stillness, and on the rare occasions when it came down she seemed somewhat surprised by what was underneath it.

What was underneath it, today, was tired. And not the surface tired of a long shift or a late night too. It was the kind that lived behind the eyes and had been there for years and didn't go away with sleep because it wasn't that kind of tired. He watched her from the windowsill. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. She looked at the ceiling. She drank her coffee.

After a while she picked up her phone and looked at it and put it down without calling anyone, which he had seen her do before, the almost, the decision against. He had wondered who it was she almost called. A friend, maybe. Someone from before, from a version of her life that had more room in it. He could not do anything about tired. He could not do anything about the almost-calls or the letters or the years of it. He was a dungeon core on a windowsill. He did the thing he could do.

He adjusted the temperature of the kitchen by two degrees, warmer, the natural warmth of a room that felt someone was in it. He had been doing this for weeks without deciding to. It was automatic now, like breathing, except he didn't breathe. Lauren wrapped both hands around her mug.

After a while her shoulders dropped, just a bit, just one increment of the many she was always holding, and she looked out the window at the ordinary street and she stayed like that for a long time and he stayed on the windowsill and outside the Sunday was very quiet. She went back to the bookkeeping eventually. But for a while she had just sat there. He thought that probably mattered.