By Thursday, Delia had three versions of the proposal and no version of the conversation in which Devon had asked her to write one that sounded as casual as she wanted it to.
He had caught her on Sunday morning, her first shift back after leave, while she was checking a stack of visitor cards. The museum could consider an evening pilot. She should put something together by June twelfth. Modest scope, clear costs, a reason for people to come back. If it worked, there would be a small stipend for taking the lead, subject to approval.
She had said, “Yes, all right,” as though he had asked her to order pencils.
Now she wanted to go back and ask him exactly how modest he meant.
In the education room, she pushed a table against the wall and paced the space that remained. Twelve people could sit comfortably. Sixteen if they used the narrower tables, though the route from the door would need care. Her first draft had included three different activities, a wall display, a short talk, and time for questions. Read aloud, the plan required either two hours or people who could move faster than she could explain.
Devon came in carrying a folder.
“Have you got five minutes?” she asked.
He looked at the displaced table. “Should I be afraid?”
“Only of the ambitious version.”
She showed him the outline. He read it standing up, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Delia watched the movement of his eyes. They stopped twice on the same page, which she did not take as a good sign.
“This is a series,” he said.
“Eventually.”
“We’re discussing one evening.”
“I know. But if the first evening suggests what could come next—”
“The first evening has to work.”
She took the paper back too quickly. He released it without comment.
“It can work,” she said. “People come in with stories about these places all the time. We show them the official photograph and they tell us what stood just outside the frame. I’d like a room where that isn’t something they have to squeeze into the last minute before closing.”
“That’s a good sentence. Put that in the proposal.”
She looked down. He was not dismissing it. She had heard the word one and started defending the entire idea before he had finished.
“What do you think is too much?”
“Three activities. The display. And this part about recording everything.”
“We wouldn’t have to record.”
“Then don’t promise it.”
He moved a chair out of the way and sat. The gesture made her sit too. For the next few minutes they crossed things out. She resisted losing the map exercise because she could see how it would draw people into conversation. He asked what happened if someone didn’t want to talk. She said they could write, or mark a place, or simply listen. He told her to make that clear in the invitation.
“Adults don’t like being surprised with homework,” he said.
“Neither do children.”
“Fair.”
They settled on a single starting question and a choice of ways to answer it. Delia kept the maps and lost the short formal talk. The display could wait until they knew whether anyone wanted the results displayed. She drew a line through the section and felt an unwelcome pinch, as though he had crossed out something she had already made.
“You can still use these ideas later,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m not giving you a smaller budget to be cruel.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
He lifted an eyebrow. She conceded the point with a small movement of her hand.
After he left, she stood in the center of the room. Without the display boards, people could move between the tables. Without the talk, she would have to trust them to begin. She placed two chairs at one table and sat in each in turn, looking at the room from the visitor’s side. From the chair nearest the door, the bright window behind her imagined standing position made her face difficult to see. She moved the table again.
Before lunch, she borrowed a colleague for ten minutes. She put a copy of an old street photograph on the table and tried the question she had planned to use.
“What does this place mean to you?”
Her colleague looked at the photograph. “I don’t know it.”
“You don’t have to know it.”
“Then it doesn’t mean anything to me yet.”
Delia opened her mouth to explain, then closed it. The woman had given her exactly what she needed, which made it frustrating that the answer was so unhelpful to her beautiful opening question.
“All right. What do you notice?”
“That man’s shoes.”
Delia looked. A man at the edge of the photograph wore shoes too large for him, or at least shoes that appeared too large from the angle. She had studied this image several times without noticing them.
“Why the shoes?”
“My grandfather wore those. Kept them polished even when the soles were falling off.”
The conversation began from there. Not the conversation Delia had written in her outline, but one about what people kept, what wore out, what a family could afford to replace. Her colleague stayed two minutes past the promised ten, then had to leave for the desk.
“Don’t put me in your report,” she said, taking her bag from the chair.
“I won’t.”
“I mean it. I’m not a test audience.”
“I know. Thank you.”
Alone again, Delia crossed out the opening question. She wrote three smaller ones beneath it, then crossed out two of those. She could imagine herself making the same mistake on the night: asking for something grand, becoming anxious at the silence, and explaining so much that nobody else had room to answer. She made a note to bring a timer, not to hurry the visitors, but to stop herself filling every pause.
The colleague returned briefly for a pen she’d left behind. Delia was tempted to tell her what she had learned from the exchange. Instead she handed over the pen and asked whether the photograph had been large enough to see comfortably.
“Yes. The shiny paper catches the light, though.”
Delia tilted it. A pale glare swallowed half the street. She added ordinary paper to the list of things she could fix without anyone’s approval.
Then she tried the question on herself. What did she notice? A woman on the far pavement was carrying something too blurred to identify. Delia wanted to know where she was going, whether she was late, whether the person taking the photograph had even seen her. She wrote those questions in the margin and put the image at the top of the pile. It was the first part of the plan she could imagine enjoying even if only a handful of people came.
At lunch she tried to call Soren. He didn’t answer. She left no message because there wasn’t anything urgent to say, then spent three minutes wondering whether she should have left one precisely to indicate that nothing was wrong. A group of children came through the foyer before she could pursue the problem. One had lost the sticker he’d been given and wanted an investigation.
By the time she returned to her phone, Soren had called back. She was about to call him again when a colleague appeared with a question about a booking. They missed each other once more before she got home.
His message read, I think we’re doing this as a sporting event. Free after nine if you are.
She sent a picture of the revised plan, crowded with crossings-out.
I’ve lost a wall display and gained a clear doorway.
Sounds like a fair trade.
She wished he were there to hear why it felt like more than that. Then she thought of him standing at the counter while people arrived for a film, checking tickets and trying to answer her at the same time. She put the phone away and went to buy something for dinner.
The supermarket was busy. She chose ingredients for a meal she had watched someone make online, changed her mind when she saw the price of one item, and bought an easier version. At home she discovered that easier still required attention. She let a pan get too hot while answering an email and opened both windows to clear the smoke.
When Soren called at nine, she was eating the edible half of the result.
“How’s your evening?” he asked.
“I’ve made a meal that would be better if I had stopped halfway.”
“What did you do?”
“Trusted a man on the internet.”
“Always dangerous.”
She described the meal. He suggested a different order for two steps, then stopped himself.
“You probably don’t want instructions.”
“I do, actually. It would be nice to eat the whole thing next time.”
He told her what he would have done. It was not a glamorous recipe, and he had to pause to remember whether he used the larger pan. She listened with the phone propped against a jar and her feet on the rung of the kitchen chair. In the background at his end, a door shut.
“Are you still downstairs?” she asked.
“Just closing up. I can go upstairs.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to sit down.”
She heard his footsteps, then the familiar silence of a change in rooms. She had never been in his apartment. She had seen the separate entrance and the windows above the cinema, and once he had pointed out which window belonged to the kitchen. That was all. He existed in her mind in the foyer, by the beach, beside the cottage door. She could not picture the chair in which he was sitting now.
“Tell me about the wall display,” he said.
She told him about the meeting with Devon. At first she gave the brisk account she might have given a colleague: smaller scope, sensible changes, deadline unchanged. Then she admitted she had wanted the first evening to demonstrate everything the museum could do differently.
“That’s a lot for an evening,” he said.
“You sound like Devon.”
“Should I apologize?”
“Possibly.”
He laughed. “I put five films in the first version of my weekend plan. Five. People would have needed to sleep in the seats.”
“Some people might enjoy that.”
“Some people already do.”
She asked what he had cut. He described a film he loved but knew would make an exhausting start. He sounded regretful, then enthusiastic about the two he had kept. She could hear the shift in his voice when he stopped describing a practical problem and began seeing the images again.
They talked for almost half an hour before he asked about Saturday. She had been waiting for the question without wanting to be the person who forced the conversation toward it. The last few days had made her acutely aware of how much could fit between visits: work, shopping, an unanswered call, a bad meal. She wanted to see him enough that she had already checked the drive twice.
“I’m free,” she said.
“I have to be downstairs for part of the afternoon. My assistant can cover the evening show. You could come earlier, or later if you don’t want to sit around.”
“I can entertain myself for an afternoon.”
“I know.” He paused. “I meant you could stay here. If you’d like to.”
She looked at the plate in front of her. There was a dark patch on the edge where she had tried to scrape off the burned part.
“At your apartment.”
“Yes.”
She could hear him waiting. She liked that he didn’t fill the silence with a joke, though it made her own answer feel larger.
“I’d like that.”
“Good.”
She smiled, alone in her kitchen. “You sound relieved.”
“I am.”
“I thought you might be asking me to sleep in one of the cinema seats.”
“Only if you complain about the apartment.”
They agreed on an arrival time. She would drive over after breakfast and leave the following afternoon. One night. No cottage reservation, no extra leave, no suitcase full of clothes for a life she had imagined months before. She wrote the time on the calendar beside the work deadline and found she was pressing the pen hard enough to mark the page beneath.
After the call, she rinsed the plate and left the pan to soak. Then she went to the bedroom and opened a drawer. She took out something she might wear on Saturday, held it against herself, and put it back. There were two days to decide. The impulse to pack immediately was both ridiculous and difficult to resist.
She sat on the bed and checked her schedule. She had arranged the weekend off before proposing the trip, and the museum rota confirmed it. There was no last-minute obstacle waiting to make the decision for her. Her mother would have opinions. Yasmin would probably have questions she didn’t want to answer. Neither of them needed to be consulted about where she slept.
The next morning, she knew, she would still have to cut another paragraph from the proposal. She would have to find a way of describing the evening that made it sound inviting without promising everyone a revelation. She would spend part of Friday answering the usual requests at work. Those things had not become less real because Soren had asked her to stay.
She got up to close the window. Below, a couple was walking a dog that wanted to go in the opposite direction. The man gave up first and followed it. Delia watched them disappear around the corner, then pulled the window down.
On her phone, a new message waited.
I should warn you: the stairs are steep and the sofa is terrible.
She typed, I wasn’t coming for the sofa.
For a moment she considered deleting it. Then she sent it, put the phone on the bedside table, and went to brush her teeth before she could invent a more careful answer.