At Friday’s rehearsal, a colleague set down the key and said she would rather listen.
“Would you rather choose something else?” Delia asked, moving the postcard within reach.
“Honestly? I’d rather hear what somebody else says first.”
Delia drew back her hand. Devon was waiting across the table, leaving her to answer.
“Then let’s do that.”
The woman pushed the key gently toward the center of the table. Devon picked up the postcard and described a place he had once lived, badly enough that Delia could not picture it but with such clear affection that she wanted to try. The woman began asking questions. Within five minutes they had left the postcard behind and were talking about a shop that had sold several things no sensible person would buy together.
Delia checked the clock. They were behind the schedule she had made for them.
She let them finish.
Afterward, Devon had to leave for another meeting. Her colleague stayed to help put the chairs back, moving carefully around a trolley of supplies.
“Was that useful?” the woman asked.
“Very. Though I suspect you were all being kind.”
“I wasn’t being polite when I said I’d rather listen.”
“I noticed.”
They smiled. The woman lifted a chair, set it against the wall, and hesitated.
“I think you need to say at the beginning that passing is allowed.”
“I do.”
“Yes, but then when I passed, you asked me again.”
Delia felt heat in her face. “I did.”
“It’s an interesting idea. I just don’t always want to talk when somebody points at me.”
“Thank you. That’s useful.”
This time she meant it without reservation. When the room was empty, she wrote PASSING IS ALLOWED on the top of her notes, then crossed out the capitals. She did not need to shout an invitation to remain silent.
On Saturday she drove to Gullhaven with the windows cracked open for the first stretch of road. The city thinned into lower buildings and then fields. A truck ahead carried rolls of turf, their exposed edges dark with soil. She passed it where the road widened, then settled behind a small car whose driver appeared determined to obey every posted limit to the exact mile.
By the time she reached the coast, her shoulders ached and she had listened to most of a podcast without retaining its subject. She parked near the Lantern at five ten. Through the glass doors she could see Soren moving chairs in the foyer.
He looked up before she knocked.
“You’re here.”
He opened the door and put a hand against her cheek. She kissed him, tasting mint and the faint warmth of a day spent inside. His other hand settled at her waist, and for a moment the long drive seemed to end somewhere beneath her ribs.
“How was the road?”
“Full of other people.”
“They do that.”
She leaned past him to look at the chairs. “How many?”
“Eleven booked. Maybe a few at the door.”
The first of his weekend film discussions began at eight. He had chosen an old thriller with an ending that had irritated Delia when he described it. She had promised to watch before arguing.
“Do you need help?” she asked.
“No. Leave your bag here for a minute; I’ll carry it through when I’ve finished.”
“I can carry it.”
“I know.” He glanced at the suitcase, then back at her. “Do you want me to?”
She was tired enough to be grateful. “Yes.”
He kissed her once more and went back to the chairs. A few minutes later he carried her overnight bag through the private entrance while she followed. Upstairs, she washed her face and changed her shirt. The apartment was quiet, with a dish towel drying over the back of a chair and a book lying open on the sofa. He put her bag in the bedroom and went to check his phone. She sat on the edge of the bed for a minute. She could hear the muffled vibration of a door closing below.
When she came out, Soren had put the phone down and was looking at two shirts hanging over the back of a chair.
“There’s a dress code?” she asked.
“No. I just don’t want to look like I’ve spent the afternoon shifting things.”
“You have spent the afternoon shifting things.”
He held up the shirts. “Which?”
She chose the darker one. He looked at it doubtfully.
“You wanted the other one,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Then wear it.”
He laughed at himself and put the darker shirt away. While he changed, Delia went to the kitchen for water. On the table lay a page of notes, several lines crossed out. She did not pick it up, though she could see he had written WELCOME at the top in large letters.
“You know how to welcome people,” she said when he returned.
“Apparently I need reminding.”
He sat opposite her and rubbed a hand over his beard. She had seen him manage a broken machine and a queue without visible panic. The prospect of talking to eleven people seemed to trouble him more.
“Want to try it on me?”
“No.”
“All right.”
He looked relieved that she meant it. She drank her water. After a moment he said, “I don’t want it to be one of those evenings where everyone proves how much they know.”
“Then don’t ask what they know.”
He looked at the page. “I haven’t.”
“Good.”
She left it there. He turned the paper over and asked whether she wanted something to eat before the screening. They made toast and ate it at the counter, standing too close because she wanted to. He got a crumb caught in his beard. She brushed it away, then kept her fingers against his cheek.
“The shirt was a good choice,” she said.
“Yours or mine?”
“I refuse to answer.”
He kissed her, smiling. She pulled him closer by the fabric at his waist. For a little while he forgot the notes. When they separated, his shirt was no longer quite as smooth as it had been.
“Now I look like I’ve been shifting things again,” he said.
“You look fine.”
He touched her mouth with his thumb, then picked up the paper. Downstairs, a door opened. He listened, recognizing the sound, and said his assistant had arrived. Delia watched him go, then went back to the bedroom to rest before the film.
She lay down for half an hour, then went downstairs because she had come to see the film, and because she wanted to see him do this.
By eight, fourteen people had arrived. Delia sat near the middle, leaving the aisle seat free. Soren stood at the front with a sheet of paper folded in one hand. He looked comfortable until he looked at the paper, at which point he seemed to forget how his own fingers worked.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I won’t talk much before it. There’s no test afterward.”
A few people laughed.
“We’ll stay here for twenty minutes when it finishes. If you need to leave, please do. If you want to stay, I’d like to know whether you think the ending works.”
He looked up. His eyes found Delia briefly, and the corner of his mouth moved.
“Some of you may have strong opinions.”
She sat back, trying not to smile too obviously.
The film began. Within ten minutes she had forgotten the rehearsal, the slow car, and the stiff place between her shoulders. The heroine on the screen was being lied to by almost everyone, though she did not yet know it. Delia liked her impatience. She disliked the hero’s habit of entering rooms without explanation. By the halfway point she was certain she knew who had hidden the letter, and by the final scene she had been proved wrong twice.
The ending still irritated her.
When the lights rose, she turned automatically to the empty seat beside her, then remembered that Soren was working. He came down the aisle carrying his folded paper. One man left with a quiet wave; the others shifted in their seats, uncertain whether to gather closer.
“Stay where you’re comfortable,” Soren said. “Can everyone hear me?”
A woman near the back said she could if he faced her. He turned toward the room.
“Better?”
She nodded.
He asked what they thought of the last scene. For three seconds, nobody answered. Delia felt the familiar urge to rescue a silence, almost physically, a movement in her throat. Soren looked around without rushing. Then a man near the front said the whole film could have been thirty minutes shorter.
“Which thirty?” Soren asked.
The man considered this more seriously than Delia expected. He named a sequence she had loved. A woman across the aisle objected, politely at first, then with increasing vigor. Soren let them speak. When the man began explaining the plot again, Soren interrupted him with a question about the scene itself.
It was not smooth. Two people tried to speak at once. Someone asked about another film entirely. Soren lost his place on the sheet, folded it smaller, and put it in his pocket.
Delia found herself enjoying the room almost as much as the film.
When he asked whether anyone believed the final reconciliation, she raised her hand without thinking, then lowered it because no one else was doing that.
“You look unconvinced,” he said.
“I don’t know what he changed.”
“He came back.”
“He was already very good at turning up without explanation.”
Several people laughed. Soren smiled, then asked her what she would have needed to see. She told him. A woman in the next row disagreed, arguing that the heroine’s decision was the real ending and the man was almost incidental.
Delia turned toward her. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“That’s how I watched it.”
They talked for another minute. Delia still did not like the reconciliation, but the woman’s version of the film stayed with her.
At ten twenty-five, Soren thanked everyone and ended the discussion before it dissolved into several competing conversations. Three people lingered in the foyer. One bought a ticket for the next weekend. Another asked whether the program would continue in the fall. Soren said he would see how these evenings went.
Delia stood by a poster and waited while he locked the public doors. She could have stacked the chairs. Her hands wanted to. Instead she read the small print beneath a photograph of a man with a magnificent false mustache.
“You hated it,” Soren said when he joined her.
“I liked most of it.”
“That’s worse.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is if the part you hate is the part I chose it for.”
He was smiling, but she could hear a little disappointment beneath it. She took his hand.
“I loved hearing people disagree about it.”
“You’d have been happier if more of them agreed with you.”
“Naturally.”
He laughed, and the defensiveness left his face. “Fourteen people.”
“Thirteen stayed.”
“One had to get a bus. He told me before.”
“Then thirteen and a half.”
He looked back at the auditorium. “I’d have liked twenty.”
“I know.”
“But fourteen is all right.”
She squeezed his fingers. He turned out the foyer lights, and they went through to the private stairs.
Upstairs, he took off his shoes and dropped heavily onto the sofa. Delia sat beside him, close enough for their thighs to touch. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes.
“How was your rehearsal?” he asked.
“Awkward.”
“Oh.” He opened his eyes. “Bad awkward?”
“Useful awkward. I told them they could pass. Then someone did, and I offered her another turn.”
“That’s quite common in my experience.”
She nudged him. “Don’t enjoy this too much.”
“I’m trying.”
She told him about the key. He listened, then asked what she intended to change. She had several answers now: fewer objects, more time, permission to watch before joining. Saying them aloud made the rehearsal feel less like a verdict and more like work she knew how to do.
“You were good downstairs,” she said.
“I lost my notes.”
“They were in your pocket.”
“I lost the ability to read them.”
“You managed.”
He turned toward her. “I liked having you there.”
The room had gone very quiet. She rested her hand against his chest, feeling the steady warmth through his shirt. She wanted to tell him something larger than that she had liked being there too. The words rose and stopped, not because she doubted them entirely but because they still seemed to need a shape she had not found.
“Come here,” she said instead.
He did. His mouth was warm, his beard rough against her cheek. She shifted closer until his arm came around her and the long evening narrowed to the pressure of his hand at her back.