Page 100 of Fate, Interrupted

“Finish your drink,” he says.

The dismissal is clean. Surgical. He needs nothing else from me.

I pick up my glass.

The wine is still excellent. I drink it until the glass is empty and push it toward Henry for a refill. I already know what I’m going to say when he gives the order. Not yes. Not I’m sorry.

I heard you.

The fewest number of words that get me from this table to the door.

Chapter twenty-six

Norah

Idon’t go home right away.

Because going home and making tea and reading the next forty pages of the biography on my bedside table is what I should do.

So, I drive.

I only have to go a few blocks before the streetlights blaze overhead. After a few blocks, I slip into an empty parking space in front of a new fusion restaurant just as another car pulls away. Even as sleepy Norwood shutters, downtown is just ramping up. Unlike my eclectic daily crowd of students, twenty-somethings, stay-at-home moms, and retired folk, the nighttime crowd here has the same demographic feel to it. Primarily white, monied, babysitter at home with the kids kind-of-feel.

It’s vanilla but as safe as it gets in a downtown area. I get out and lock the door, slipping a few quarters in the meter.

I walk.

This is fine. This is me exercising my autonomy with an evening walk in a perfectly safe neighborhood several blocks from my shop, where the restaurants are still lit and the boutiques have their window displays going and the alleys are decorative and contain artisanal garbage.

The evening is warm. A restaurant door is propped open, customers sitting around café tables under an awning outside. The scent of garlic and warm, yeasty bread wafts out, setting my stomach to grumbling. Somebody using effort and skill, making something for people who planned ahead. I’m mildly inspired and make a resolution to go to the grocery store tomorrow to restock my shrinking pantry and refrigerator shelves.

A couple passes me, arguing about Thai versus Italian with the focused energy of people who have been together long enough that the argument is affectionate. A man on his phone gestures elaborately outside a vintage clothing store. A woman walking her dog on an extendable leash ties him to a parking meter outside a gift store and steps inside. The dog immediately stretches himself across the sidewalk, searching for his owner.

I step around the dog.

I used to love this unreservedly. The movement, the noise, the anonymity of a city where nobody cares what you’re doing as long as you’re not blocking the sidewalk. I came here because I wanted this. I built The Last Chapter here because this felt like a place where a single woman running a bookshop could exist without having to explain herself to anyone. Three years ago, that felt like enough. It was enough. I was happy with enough.

But if I’m being honest with myself, I started changing my mind long before tonight.

I think about what those two boys said. What they believed when they said it. That they were protecting a way of life that depended on people like Silas staying in their assigned place. That my choice was a problem requiring correction.

And then I think about what it takes to be Silas in this city.

Not just tonight. Every day. Every route through neighborhoods where people dwell who have opinions about where wolf-owned trucks should be. In every negotiation, the other side has already decided what he is before he opens his mouth. Every time he walks into a room, people sit up and pay attention, whether or not it’s in a good way. And he’s been doing this his entire life.

The operational efficiency of that. The sheer daily cost of it.

Those guys in the alley are beside the point. They are a symptom. The condition is older and larger than two disgruntled young men who had a bad night.

I turn down a side street I like, narrower, quieter. There’s a yarn shop I visit every six months or so when I’m ready to begin a new project. Its window display has knit tops in summer fibers, hemp, bamboo, cotton, all chic and monochromatic. It’s a lovely display, and I make a mental note to come back. I pass a new wine bar with good lighting and a menu with eight items, a statement in itself. Next door to that is a tailor whose window display houses an antique Singer sewing machine. The contrast to the glass and chrome décor of the wine bar is somehow comforting. This is the street I walk when I need to think.

Here is the question I keep arriving at and walking away from: if Silas had never come through that door, if I’d never met him, never offered him tea, never offered the book he had no intention of reading but took only because I recommended it, would any of this be different?

No.

The guys in the alley exist because the city is what it is. Silas lives in the midst of that whether I’m in the picture or not. I could walk away from him tomorrow, and the city would still be what it is, and he would still have to navigate it, and the next woman who made a choice they disapproved of would find herself in her own dim alley on her own evening.

The problem isn’t me choosing Silas.