I had been staring at the same sentence for forty-five minutes: “The light through the stained glass fell on Vera’s notes like a question.” I couldn’t move past it. The words were right, but the feeling was wrong.
Every sixty seconds, he would tap his ring—silver, worn thin—against the wooden arm of his chair. Tap. Then nothing. Tap. Then nothing. vera jarw merida sat
And I was just a writer on a Saturday afternoon, realizing that the table we were all sharing—the waiting man, the building child, the ghost of a librarian, and me—was not a collection of strangers. I had been staring at the same sentence
That, I thought, is either the definition of hope or the definition of madness. Perhaps they are the same thing. And then there was Vera . Then nothing
Vera wasn't there. Not in body. But her notes were—scattered across my table, because I was supposed to be writing her biography. Vera had been a librarian here in the 1940s. She had hidden a collection of forbidden poetry inside the bindings of old agricultural reports. She had been fired for it. She had never apologized.
I thought he was waiting for someone. But as the hour turned, I realized: Jarw was waiting for time itself to admit it had made a mistake. By the window, Merida was building a house of cards. She was seven, maybe eight. Her mother (presumably the woman who kept checking her phone by the biography section) had told her to “be still.” Merida had interpreted this as “be still except for your hands.”