Chapter Ten — Eight O'Clock Is a Wound

At 7:55, the oral-history exhibition was still refusing to end neatly.

A retired bus driver had recognized his old route supervisor in a photograph and was arguing, with unmistakable affection, about the year printed beneath it. Priya had produced the original accession record. The driver had produced a memory involving a broken heater, three furious passengers, and a sandwich that had apparently survived twenty-seven winters in local mythology.

Luna listened, checked the record with Priya, and promised to look into it. It was the sort of tiny, stubborn correction that mattered to her. An entire neighborhood could lose the texture of its history through enough small things being labeled incorrectly.

For nearly ten minutes she had managed to be wholly present.

Then her phone buzzed against the counter.

She knew it wasn't another reply from VESPER. Those notifications had become a continuous vibration, like the device was trying to tunnel through the building. This was a different sound, the one she'd assigned to Asher after he'd made a theatrical complaint about being grouped with delivery updates.

Her hand moved before she told it to.

She stopped with her fingers an inch above the screen.

Outside the alcove, the bus driver was telling Priya that the disputed photograph definitely predated a particular hairpiece. Luna could hear her coworker attempting to conduct archival verification without laughing. Tonight had been good. The families had come. The recordings had worked. She'd been brave in front of people who had trusted her with voices they couldn't get back.

And Asher hadn't been there.

Across the city, at 7:59, Asher was alone in the rehearsal office, still wearing the jacket he'd picked up off a chair three separate times without actually leaving.

He had a message open. The first version contained too much about the safety cue. He deleted it. The second began by telling her how sorry he was that the evening had been difficult, as though the evening had sprung an ambush and he'd merely been a witness.

He deleted that too.

The third took longer, because it required him to stop arguing with someone who wasn't in the room.

He pressed send.

Luna opened it at 8:01.

There was no accident in that. Her phone wasn't buried in her bag; she hadn't been called away by an emergency. She deliberately unlocked the screen and read every word. The little apology was specific enough to hurt. He'd finally named the warning, the joke, the unfair comparison. He understood, or was trying to.

She read the last sentence again.

I'd like to listen this time.

A reasonable part of her wanted to answer, even if the answer was only that she was still furious. She had spent the afternoon wishing he'd give her information before she had to pry it out of him. Here it was. Not perfect, not a repair, but an opening.

Another part of her remembered standing behind the exhibition board at 5:38, trying to make her voice sound normal while the empty chair sat waiting. She remembered the way she'd been prepared to tell him about the cabinetmaker's daughter, and how quickly the conversation had become a defense of the important thing he had needed to do elsewhere.

He can wait, she thought.

It wasn't a considered plan. It was worse: a clean, sudden desire to make his evening contain a fraction of the absence he'd left in hers.

She could type two words. She knew that. She could even tell him not to call.

Instead she set the open phone on the counter.

In the rehearsal office, the status beneath Asher's message changed.

Read · 8:01 PM.

He straightened in his chair. There it was. She'd seen it. That didn't mean she'd forgiven him, and he hadn't asked her to. He set the phone down and looked at the wall clock.

At 8:03 he called.

The phone began ringing in Luna's hand.

She was standing just inside the staff exit now. She could see the rain-glossed pavement through the little window. On the screen, Asher calling appeared above the same photograph she'd chosen because his smile in it was so obnoxiously sure of itself.

Her thumb hovered over Answer.

She could still make him hear how angry she was. He might defend himself again. He might finally listen. The conversation could be ugly and useful and inconvenient. All she had to do was answer.

Instead she waited.

One ring. Two.

A third, during which she was painfully aware that she was counting them.

She pressed the side button to silence the sound, leaving the call unanswered. She watched until it disappeared.

The missed-call notice settled below the message she had opened.

Only then did she notice that her hands were shaking.

She wasn't doing this because a superstar had replied to Orbit. She knew precisely why she had withheld the answer. VESPER's impossible public attention had made the evening feel electric, had offered her somewhere glamorous to direct the part of herself that wanted to be wanted. But she had been angry at Asher before the reply. She had chosen to make him feel shut out.

And there was a small, ugly satisfaction in knowing he'd seen her read it.

“Luna?”

Priya stood at the other end of the alcove, holding the last stack of programs. “I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm locking the rear cabinet. Are you heading out?”

“Soon.”

“You've done enough here. The bus driver has accepted a temporary ceasefire over the hairpiece, pending documentary evidence.”

That got a laugh out of Luna, though it came out thinner than usual.

“You okay getting home?”

“I'm walking. It's not far.”

Priya studied her for a moment, then decided, mercifully, not to interrogate her. “Text when you're in. And don't spend the whole night rewriting the introduction. People liked it the way you said it.”

Luna nodded. That was something she could believe without argument.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Philadelphia smelled of wet brick, exhaust, and somebody frying onions in an apartment above the street. Luna pulled her jacket tight and started toward home. Her phone lit up twice with fan-account notifications and once with a message from Junia.

Luna could answer Junia. Apparently her thumbs weren't broken.

That realization followed her past a shuttered café and two neighbors carrying a sofa up a stoop. She hadn't forgotten Asher. She wasn't too overwhelmed by the internet to function. She had been able to read one friend's messages, make a joke, and walk safely across a street.

She simply wasn't answering him.

At 8:18, Asher was still in the rehearsal office. His call history showed one unanswered attempt. He had not made a second. He could justify another call as proof he cared, but he was starting to suspect that another attempt would be less about listening than about making the discomfort stop.

He turned the phone face down. For once, his name could reach millions of strangers and not the person he wanted.

He didn't know that the woman behind Orbit's spectacular victory lap was the one refusing his call. All he knew was that a message he'd tried hard to get right had been read, and that the silence afterward was making the room feel much larger than it was.

By 8:23, Luna was inside her flat.

Fernando, the greenhouse fern on the bathroom windowsill, had no opinion on what she'd done. He looked better than she felt.

She sent Junia a quick Home, set her keys in their usual dish, and stood in the kitchen without switching on the overhead light. There was leftover dinner in the fridge. There were photographs from the exhibition on her phone. There was a public reply from VESPER that she could have looked at for an hour and still found something new to scream about.

And there was Asher's apology, opened and unanswered.

She told herself he needed to understand what an empty place felt like. She told herself she wasn't ready for another conversation. Both things were true.

Neither explained why she'd let the call ring out rather than tell him so.

Luna sat at the small kitchen table, pulled the phone close, and looked at the blank space where her answer could have been.

She did not type.

For tonight, she wanted him to feel the silence.

It was only after she turned the screen over that she began to wonder how long she could bear it herself.