I’m aware.
The trouble with grief was that everyone wanted you to do it their way. Cry in the right places. Accept the casseroles. Sit in a circle and say what hurt.
I’d done all of it. I’d nodded and thanked people and thrown away three lasagnas, because Brian had hated lasagna. So I’d driven four hours from London to Hastings with no plan beyond salt air, distance, and not having to look at his empty locker for three whole blessed days.
A dealer in a tweed jacket gave me a hopeful smile as I slowed near a table of military buttons and cracked leather-bound books.
“Looking for anything in particular?”
“Just browsing.”
The great lie of antique fairs. Everyone was just browsing, right up until they found the thing they’d apparently been missing since birth.
He looked so disappointed that I picked up a silver-plated toast rack and pretended to admire it. I’d never understood toast racks. The bread just stood there at attention going cold, which seemed both bossy and unkind.
Brian would have said it was peak England, turning toast into architecture. The thought of him landed sharp under my ribs.
I set the toast rack down before I bought the thing out of pure sentiment and moved on through the pavilion.
Outside, the wind rattled the windows. A gull pecked at something on the promenade, looking personally offended by its meager lunch. The light had gone thin and silvery while I’d browsed, slipping in and out between the clouds and glinting off the glass cases.
The last booth was tucked behind one of the pillars, half in shadow and half hidden by a hanging tapestry that smelled strongly of dust and mildew. Most people walked right past it without slowing.
I nearly did the same.
Then something winked at me from a tray near the back.
One flash of blackened silver beneath a clutter of old buckles and bent spoons.
The woman behind the table didn’t look up. She was older, though not in a frail way. Her silver hair was pinned at the nape of her neck, her back was straight, and her hands moved through the objects as though she knew exactly where every odd little thing belonged.
She wore a dark green coat, a wool scarf the color of wet stone, and several heavy gold rings.
“Careful,” she said.
I froze with my fingers hovering over the tray. “Sorry. I wasn’t going to pocket anything.”
“Never said you were.”
I cocked my head at her. “Then careful of what?”
At that, she looked up.
Her eyes were pale blue, sharp and assessing. The sort of eyes that weighed you up and filed you away before you’d finished saying hello.
“The thing that calls back,” she said.
I laughed, because that seemed like what the moment required, but it came out thin. “That’s a different sales technique.”
“I’m not selling.”
“Then this is a very confusing business model.”
The corner of her mouth twitched, though it never quite turned into a smile.
I should have walked away. Truly, I should have.
I’d been told all my life that I had too much curiosity and not enough respect for strange situations, which was rich coming from a family that once kept a Christmas pudding for four years because nobody wanted to be the one to ask if it had gone off.
