Morning behaved, but only because someone was watching.
The shop wore its usual competence: tea hotter than arguments, paper smelling of patience, the bell chiming as if tuned to Mahmoud's pulse. Kemi stacked biscuits like gambits. Caleb checked the back door twice without making it look like fear. Leona laid the newly taken slide—BEND, SECOND LIGHT—on a square of linen as if setting down a truth you didn't want to bruise.
"It moved last night," Kemi said. "The painting. The fog wrote NOT YET. My dreams filed a complaint."
"Dreams need queues," Mahmoud replied, opening the shallow light-box they'd used before. "We'll give them one."
He toggled the brass switch. The thin winter-breath of light rose and met the smoked glass with the patience of a river approaching its own mouth. Lines bloomed; the delta resolved; the ring inside turned, remembering hands. Along the bottom edge, faint as a confession whispered inside a church, a new band of glyphs glimmered and died.
Caleb leaned in. "New layer."
Leona angled the slide, coaxing. The light sharpened; a phrase surfaced in miniature script, a ledger's idea of intimacy.
HOLD GLASS TO A LIVING MIRROR.
Kemi blinked. "A living what now?"
"A mirror that remembers," Mahmoud said, already moving. He led them to the little washroom where a foxed oval hung above a porcelain sink like an unrepentant ghost. "This glass has stared at more faces than truth. It will do."
Leona hesitated. Her reflection waited in the oval's tarnished field: pale from not enough sleep, hair corralled into honesty, eyes carrying dawn's unfinished math. She lifted the palm-glass. The older mirror received it like a second pupil set against its own.
The room cooled. Somewhere in the shop, the bell half-chimed and then thought better of it.
"Shadow clock," she said.
Caleb placed it on the windowsill, brass pointer aligned north by instinct. The thin beam in the light-box continued its work, but something—some invisible hinge—swung in the room. For a breath, the old mirror did not reflect at all. It held.
Then the reflection returned—late by a second—and smiled before Leona did.
Kemi didn't swear, which was how you knew it was serious. "Nope," she said softly. "Nope in italics."
The girl in the glass was Leona—except the edges had learned grace from time. A thread of silver lifted from the temple like a delicate truth. The eyes were her eyes, but carried a weather Leona hadn't yet earned.
"Do you see it?" Caleb asked, low.
"I do," Mahmoud said, not taking his gaze away. "And it sees us."
The other-Leona—older, unchanged, impossible—lifted a hand. Leona's hand lifted too, half a beat late. The palm-glass hummed once, as if recognizing a kin it couldn't name.
"Who are you?" Leona asked.
The woman in the mirror's mouth moved. No sound carried, but the condensation on the inside of the oval gathered itself and wrote two letters at a time like someone refusing to hurry.
LEONA.
Leona's heart mis-stepped. Caleb's head turned; Kemi glanced between them; Mahmoud folded his hands in front of him the way you do when language arrives wearing your mother's coat.
"Your family name for you?" Mahmoud asked gently.
Leona kept her eyes on the mirror. "My father used to say it when I was asleep," she said. "As if the night would forget me without a second name."
The older reflection—Leona—tipped her head. The condensation cleared and returned, tracing more words.
YOU KEPT THE RIVER. KEEP YOUR NAME.
Leona swallowed. "Leona," she said back, like an experiment.
The mirror warmed a fraction. A ripple passed under the foxing; the oval felt, suddenly, less old. Leona lowered the palm-glass and the mirror dimmed as if exhaling. When she raised it again, brightness returned with the obedience of a loaded term.
"What do you want?" she asked.
The answer formed slowly, as if the glass had to think through someone else's memory:
DO NOT ALIGN THEM ALL.
Kemi exhaled. "Francine's note in the box."
Mahmoud nodded. "The river remembers in layers."
A final line scrolled beneath the others, sharper now, letters cut from cold air:
BRING WATER TO THE MIRROR. HOLD IT UNTIL IT DRINKS.
"The sink?" Kemi offered.
"Not tap," Mahmoud said immediately. "Memory prefers itself."
Caleb was already moving. "I'll fetch from the river," he said, taking the waiting glass bottle from the shelf. "Back in ten."
"Not alone," Leona said.
He smiled at her in the mirror—his mirror self closer than the flesh one—and then at her shoulder, warm. "Every path in and out is in my head. I'll be three minutes."
He was four.
By the time he returned, the mirror's surface had gone from merely reflective to intent. The palms of Leona's hands prickled. The shadow clock's pointer vibrated once against nothing—metal anticipating task.
Caleb set the bottle on the sink and uncapped it. The room changed its posture. Leona lifted the palm-glass to the oval and, with her other hand, raised the bottle until its lip touched the mirror's bottom edge.
Kemi held her breath like a superstition. Mahmoud murmured, "Steady."
For a moment, nothing. Then the mirror's lower border darkened. The river water climbed the glass as if taught, a slow capillary ascent that disobeyed gravity politely. When it reached the oval's center, the old foxing brightened from beneath. A shape appeared where Leona's throat would be if the reflection were honest: a small circle, and inside it, a ring that matched the iron at Pier 3 down to the tiniest scratch.
The circle pulsed once. The bottle in Leona's hand grew lighter by a sip. The mirror drank.
"Okay," Kemi whispered. "Absolutely no laws today."
The condensation wrote again, faster now, as though hydrated thinking cost less:
LEONA, READ.
Beneath the command, three lines appeared—no longer words, but marks that already lived in the nerve-memory of Leona's hands: the tally of the pier, the circle of the ring, the angled stroke from Francine's map that pointed upstream.
"Instructions," Mahmoud said. "Or coordinates disguised as verbs."
Leona's name in her ears rearranged the room. LEONA was a chord her chest understood; the sound moved the small birds in her ribs in a way LEONA never had. She felt foolish for knowing it and relieved for the foolishness.
"Read what?" she asked.
The mirror answered with an image this time, not script. A room appeared behind the oval's surface: the gallery's hidden vault, but not as they'd left it. The box labeled KEEP stood open. A different slide than hers lay on the felt: MOUTH, FIRST SHADOW. A hand reached in from somewhere outside the picture, ring on its finger—not the iron ring, thinner, gold—hesitated, and withdrew empty.
Kemi made a small sound. "Somebody else."
"A rival," Caleb said. "Or a partner who forgot where the line is."
Leona lifted the palm-glass tight to the mirror. The image sharpened until it looked less seen and more remembered. A fragment, but with a pulse. She watched the unseen hand hover, then retreat again without touching.
"Not theft," she said. "Fear."
The mirror accepted her sentence. The image vanished. Letters returned with urgency:
UPSTREAM. SECOND LIGHT. BRING RIVER. BRING RING. BRING READER. DO NOT BRING AUDIENCE.
Mahmoud's eyebrows rose. "Someone has learned from loving you, Leona. The instructions have become pastoral."
Kemi recovered her voice. "So: no Auction, no watchers, no anonymous helpful strangers with cameras. Just us and a river with an appetite."
"And the ledger," Caleb added. "Always the ledger."
The mirror fog thinned as the water level in the bottle lowered another fraction. When Leona pulled it away, a last sentence traced itself and held like an oath:
KEEP UNTIL IT KEEPS YOU BACK.
"Enough for today," Mahmoud said gently, and shut off the light-box. The room warmed. The mirror, relieved of being more than itself, returned to tarnish and steel.
Leona stood very still. Inside, the name LEONA settled into old hinges. She didn't feel renamed so much as correctly called. When she looked at her reflection again, it waited like a companion who would not hurry her grief.
"Leona?" Kemi tested, soft and cautious as if nudging a sleeping cat.
Leona smiled, and this time the mirror waited for her. "You can use it," she said. "It knows me."
Caleb set the bottle down and dried his hands on a towel that had learned more about metaphysics than most towels ever do. "Upstream," he said.
"Upstream," Leona echoed. She tucked the slide into its linen, the bottle into her tote, and the ring into her pocket where it warmed like thought. The shadow clock settled on true north as if relieved to find that the compass of a life and the compass of a needle could agree.
They moved back into the shop. Aya—who had politely not asked what the washroom had become—looked up and read the weather of their faces. "Should I pack courage?" she asked.
"Always," Mahmoud said. "Today, also towels."
They stepped into a city that had forgotten to be hostile for half an hour. Sun wrote thin gold along the curb; the river, somewhere out of sight, checked its pulse against the wind. As they reached the street, Leona's phone vibrated—no anonymous link this time, only a photograph from a number she knew: the gallery facade, blank as ever, and in the lower corner the faint shadow of a person standing just outside the frame.
Two fingers lifted in a small salute.
Leona tightened her hand on the tote until the ring pressed insistence into her palm. She didn't turn. She smiled once at the crosswalk signal, because sometimes obedience deserves a reward, and said, "Let's go make the mirror drink."
"If it refuses," Kemi said, "I'm feeding it biscuits."
"If it refuses," Mahmoud corrected, "we will have learned something about its appetite."
Caleb touched the small of Leona's back—a permission, not a push. "Leona," he said, trying the name on like a suit tailored for truth, "we'll keep you."
"Only if I keep us," she answered.
They crossed. Behind them, the old oval mirror in the dim washroom held their departing shapes for one extra heartbeat and then let them go—obedient again, but not unchanged.