Their hands stay joined.
Rain needles the edges of everything—coat seams, knuckles, the notch of Luca's wrist where the dull silver sits like a sober promise. The stone under their soles is slick but honest. They stand on the top step long enough to let the sea finish its sentence behind them and the street announce itself: tires hissing past the gutter, a bus breathing old diesel, a gull setting down on the broken sign with the entitlement of a landlord.
Luca slows—head tipped, listening the way houses taught him. It's tiny, almost imaginary: a single note, bright as bead-glass, stitched into the rain. Not a melody—just that one tone, like a fingertip finding middle C on a closed lid miles away. It lifts. Fades. Leaves the air the way a spoon leaves broth.
He smiles at her, guilty and delighted, as if a stray cat has put its paw in his palm. "Did you hear—?"
"Let it go," Mira says, not unkind, turning his wrist so the thread is visible to both of them. She says it like a nurse releasing a tourniquet. "Down."
He breathes. On six.
"On six," he agrees, and the hunger that would have followed that note like a dog sits, puzzled, then wanders off to learn another life. His shoulders drop a quarter-inch. The smile stays, smaller and better proportioned.
They step onto the pavement together, wet shoes clacking louder than seems decent. The sign's gilded letters lie belly-down in the gutter, no name left in them—just the flash of leaf under a film of oily rain. A van grinds past and sends a fan of water up that kisses their calves; Mira lifts the ledger arm a little out of habit and then drops it, remembering the book is not under her coat anymore; it has a rock to be patient on.
Elara is three stairs below them still, towel firm over her arm, hair dark with rain, face alight as a kitchen when the oven catches. "I'll fetch the ledger when you say," she calls, not too loud. "Or after buns. Or both." She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand and pretends it's weather.
"Kitchen first," Adrien says without looking away from the hotel. He says it like an absolution he's allowed to give. "Then stain. Then the alley. We have daylight to argue with."
Corvi hugs her soaked silk to her ribs as if it might still perform inheritance if she wrings it hard enough. "You can't just walk away," she says to the wet, to the broken sign, to the pair of them standing on the step like a comma. "You can't leave a property in this—state."
"We aren't," Mira says over her shoulder. "We're walking toward bread." She doesn't turn fully. She gives the façade one last clinical look—the way you give a patient the last check before discharge—and then faces the town.
They go.
No processional, no flourish—just the ordinary logistics of two people moving a body each through wet morning: the heel-to-toe weight, the small citrus squeak of her coat lining, the click of Luca's teeth when he misreads a ridge in the stone and smiles at his mouth for working. The street lists a little toward the drain; puddles occupy low ground with belligerent dignity. Their joined hands swing, not rhythmically—they're still learning each other's stride—but without apology.
Gulls heckle from the low roofline like critics who slept badly and resent anyone upright. Shop shutters are in the act of becoming doors: one gray panel halfway up reveals the solemn ankles of chairs stacked in a café; another rattles because the chain moved wrong and needs a human to scold it. Somewhere close, a machine expresses strong feelings about grinding beans. The first run of buns hits a sheet; the air turns a shade sweeter.
"Tea," Luca says, reverent as if praying to a benevolent, reliable god.
"Hot," Mira says. "In cups not pretending to be chalices." She tugs him gently around a puddle where the reflection of the hotel's top windows wobbles, then tears. "And towels," she adds. "Actual towels. Elara will scold us if we drip in her kitchen."
"She'll scold me for everything," he says, content. "I find it bracing."
"Good," Mira says. "You can practice taking instruction. I am delegating shouting to her."
He swings their hands a hair, testing humor, then checking if the motion reads as performing. It doesn't; it's just fingers adjusting to the geography. "What is the policy on buns," he asks. "If raisins happen."
"Raisins are an assault," Mira says. "We send them back politely and report the bakery to the maritime authority."
"The sea will handle it," he says, as if deputizing tide. He glances at the silver on his wrist, at the square knot seated over tendon. Rain has deepened the dullness to a pewter that suits him. "How long does it stay on."
"Until it forgets it was ever magic," she says. "Then it is thread. If it feels like a leash before then, it goes." She squeezes his hand to underline the clause and feels him ease into the squeeze—human, not symbol.
They pass the broken sign; the gull on it hops once and leaves, bored of the gold. Luca's gaze pauses on the curve of a letter that is no letter anymore. He reaches with his free hand to flick a leaf of gilt that clings, then stops his fingers before they touch—remembering what games rooms play even with trash. "I won't collect relics," he says quietly. "If anything needs saving, Elara will save it."
"Correct," Mira says. "She is union where it matters."
The town is making noises that have nothing to do with appetite: a gate's chain yanked; a mop bucket sloshed; a laugh from a delivery driver that dissipates before anyone can buy it. A newspaper cart's squeak announces headlines nobody intends to believe. An old man with a barrow of fish pauses to look at them with mild professional interest, decides they are human enough to leave alone, and moves on.
"You wanted solitude," Luca says, almost gentle, almost asking permission to touch a bruise that isn't on skin. "Before this. You made a career of it."
"I wanted control," she corrects without heat. "Solitude is a cheaper brand of that." A car noses around a parked van and sends a spray onto the near curb. She shifts half a step, moving his body with hers, the way you move someone around something that will definitely be sticky later. "I will still take quiet when I need it," she adds. "But I am done pretending it's a virtue I carry while other people make the mess for me to be superior about."
"I will practice not being a mess," he offers, far too solemnly to be believed, then amends: "I will clean after myself and let you see it so you don't have to wonder."
"Better," she says. "Also you will not fix anything in the kitchen unless Elara hands you a tool."
"She will hand me a towel," he predicts. "A microphone that tells the truth."
They pass a door with frosted glass, the name of a solicitor ghosting in black letters backward. A smaller sign taped up says: NO MIRRORS FOR SALE HERE. Luca snorts, delighted. "Civilization," he murmurs.
"We'll rent a room," Mira says, knuckles tightening once around his. "Windows. No glass you can interrogate. If there are mirrors, we'll turn them to the wall." She steals a look at him and looks away, almost laughing at herself. "And a radiator that does not flirt."
"I will interview it," he says. "If it sighs on purpose, I'll report to you. Or Elara. Or the tide."
"Good," she says. "We'll install a coat hook that doesn't confess."
He watches her face when she says we and stores the shape of it like a receipt. Rain collects on his hair and drips into his collar; he makes a small face at the cold and then stops because the cold belongs to him, which turns it into something like pleasure. "Tea first," he lists, as if carrying the agenda in his mouth. "Towels. Dry clothes. Windows. A shelf for the ledger until the sea caves at low tide."
She nods, methodical. "We won't feed it to drama," she says. "We'll file it between stone and water and let it go to carpentry." She wipes an arc of rain from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist. "You will not sermonize in the cave."
"I will trip on a rock and apologize," he says. "That will be my homily."
They pause at a crossing because a baker is rolling a rack of cooling trays across the lane with the concentration of a man doing something sacred and stupid at the same time. Steam rises briefly into the gray and makes its own weather—sweet, obscene. Luca's stomach barks. "Immediate truth," he says. "I might cry over a bun."
"Do," Mira says. "Tears soak raisins off."
The baker catches sight of them and gives a nod that says he hasn't the bandwidth to care what kind of trouble they are, so long as they are the sort that pays cash and leaves crumbs politely. "Ten minutes," he says, as if that were the only number anyone needs. "Kettle's on."
"Bless you," Adrien says before he can help himself.
"Don't start," the baker says amiably, and vanishes into steam.
They keep walking because stopping would make the part of the morning that knows it is a play try to show off. Their shoes clack; water flicks up; Mira's cuff wicks and sticks at her wrist. Luca's shirt clings where she smoothed it on the strand; it loosens as he warms, the fabric learning the shape of his back like a good student.
He glances at their hands, at how easily his slides against hers without trying to improve the posture of any moment. "What if I forget," he says. "In a week. In a kitchen where the light lands just so. What if I start pushing without noticing."
"You'll notice," she says. "And when you don't, I will." She squeezes once, insists gently, lets go of the insistence without letting go of him. "Any room we live in will be supervised. It will learn its place."
He nods and tucks that phrase into the pocket in his head where he keeps the ones that saved him. "What if there are nights when the window insists," he says, not seducing—worried. "When the draft remembers how to hum."
"We shut it," she says. "We put a towel under the sash. We go stand at the bus stop and watch drunks misunderstand their lives until we're bored. We do something unpoetic on purpose." She cocks her head at him. "Or we ask Adrien to read us a boring psalm."
Adrien coughs a laugh behind them, surprised to be cited. "I have a short one about goats."
"Excellent," Luca says gravely. "Goats are the opposite of glamour."
They pass a picture-framer's window bare of pictures—glass reflecting only rain and two people who are not outlines anymore. Luca checks his face in it reflexively, then remembers and looks at her instead, not performing the virtue—just doing the work. She sees the correction; she doesn't say a word; approval would cheapen it.
"Clothes," Mira says, practical. "Elara has a cupboard for emergencies: sweaters abandoned by men who thought they'd come back with better stories; trousers in impossible sizes. You will look ridiculous."
"I look ridiculous now," he says cheerfully. "The tide has styled me." He glances down at the dull loop on his wrist. "May I keep this when it's only thread."
"If you want to remember being sensible, yes," she says. "If you want to pretend to yourself that the world owes you magic, no."
"I will keep it for the first thing," he says, and tugs the knot lightly with his teeth in curiosity, the way boys test rules with hands empty of stones. He catches her look and releases it at once. "I will not gnaw it," he corrects, grinning.
They reach the corner where the road lowers toward the harbor's proper quay and the town tries to remember that it used to be a port before it was a brochure. A fishmonger is dragging a hose—water snakes bright across brick and makes temporary rivers; a woman in a blue apron smacks a table with the flat of her hand to settle it. "No more wobble," she tells the legs, and the legs agree. A boy chalks a menu board with the number of the day as if it were fact. 7. He steps back, frowns, and puts a circle around it like a saint's head.
"Seven," Luca says under his breath, amused like a person catching the universe being too on the nose and forgiving it because it's early.
"The radiator better not take it as encouragement," Mira says.
They pass a shop with a blank window where somebody has stripped out a display overnight. The space looks more honest without anything to sell. A woman with a bucket and a mop pauses to smile at them in a way that is not mystical. "Wet," she observes, and offers a nod that includes towels and tea and the way the morning is going to hurt some people later and make others bearable.
"Room," Mira says, quieting down into the thought the way one sits on a bench that has remembered its job. "We'll take the one above the bakery, if he'll rent for a week. Two windows. Close to bread. No mirrors. The floor slants but it's honest about it. The kettle screams; we respect that."
"I will buy it an apology in the form of descaled coils," Luca says. "I am useful with vinegar."
"You will be supervised with vinegar," Mira says without emphasis, which is its own kind of kindness.
He hums—not timing; just a human buzzing to keep teeth from chattering. It tries to become something. He notices. He stops. The nothing that remains is better than music.
"Buns," Elara announces suddenly behind them, as if she has just remembered her own body can have joy in it without making anyone else pay. "The kind that grease paper. I will bully them away from raisins with a look."
"We will pay extra for the privilege of virtue," Adrien says. "It will still be cheaper than miracles."
Corvi has stopped following; the world has given her too many loose parts to count and not enough staff to blame. She stands under an awning, arms folded, silk sulking, eyes on the broken name in the gutter. She looks small in a way no woman enjoys. She watches them go with the exhausted contempt of a queen outlived by her throne. The wind lifts the edge of the awning and snaps it at her like a towel. She flinches and pretends she didn't.
Mira doesn't look back. She looks at his silver-threaded wrist, then at the street ahead, and keeps the pace that saves ankles. "There will be work," she says—not warning; schedule. "Paper to unlearn. Rooms to put on honest rations. Stains to read. A cave for a filing cabinet. Days where I am unreasonable."
"And my job," he says, matching step, "will be to be reasonable without being a martyr. To laugh when you are funny and shut up when you need me to be quiet. To mop. To be cold for my own reasons and warm for ours."
"Add: to sleep," she says. "On purpose. Not as theater."
"I will learn," he says, surprised and not embarrassed by the idea that sleep might be a skill. "And you. Add: to ask for help before you are a saint about it."
"I will," she says, and it sounds like truth because she says it as if drafting a clause into a contract she intends to enforce on herself.
They stop at the corner because the bakery door has opened and the interior has fogged its own glass with congratulations. The baker lifts a tray with a grunt and lets the smell slap the street. The buns are not golden; they are the color of good decision—deep, unphotogenic brown, sweating slightly. No raisins. The tops shine from a brush that didn't skimp.
"Two," Mira says to the baker.
"Four," Luca says to the air, then to Mira: "I'm planning for repentance."
"We'll share," she says, and does not spoil him by smiling too much.
"Tea," the baker says. "Towels," he adds, eyeing the dark all down their sleeves with the unsentimental charity of tradesmen. "My wife will not forgive your puddles otherwise."
"Our soles will confess their crimes at the mat," Adrien says, already reaching for the towel like a man who has learned that linen is a sacrament.
They do not go in yet. The street is still the correct size for them, and the door would turn this into shelter too soon. They stand under the awning and let the rain revise the parts of their faces that might have been tempted to dramatize. Luca turns his wrist, looks again at the dull thread, presses the knot with his thumb and feels pulse answer. It makes him grin in a way that is not pretty, just new.
"Last thing," he says, as if remembering a chore and loving it for being small. "Room with wide windows. No mirrors. A radiator that doesn't sigh. A table that won't wobble. A hook for your coat. A cup that isn't heavy with the idea that we are special."
"And a bed," she says, exactly as a doctor would—recorded, no flourish. "Which we will treat like furniture that does not accept applause."
"And curtains," he says. "But not thick enough to lie." He nudges his shoulder against hers, the smallest bump, checking for permission to do it again some other morning. "We will turn the mirror to the wall and leave it there until glass learns it is for light only."
"And if it doesn't," she says, "we will put a plant in front of it and forget." She squeezes his fingers and looks out past the awning to where the sea has become an argument between gray and silver that is probably going to go on all day. "When the tide drops," she says, "we walk to the caves and file the ledger. Window time first. Tea first. Room first."
He nods. "I can hold my curiosity like a cup." He stacks his immediate hungers in his mouth and chews them into a plan: "Tea. Towels. Toys for radiators. A room. Bread. After that, the stain. Later, the cave. After that, I will learn how to sleep."
"You will practice not narrating your errands like a charm," she says, smiling despite herself.
"I'm excited," he says, almost apologizing to the rain. "Excited is not glamour. It is… appetite that buys its own groceries."
"Good," she says. "Buy the groceries. Don't invoice the room."
He looks back the exact amount a person must look back to make sure a rock is still a rock. The ledger on its dry shelf sits where she left it—board up, towel faithful. Rain has almost reached its edge and then changed its mind. He breathes out and lets his shoulders communicate to his old reflex that no, we are not climbing a parapet to rescue a book like a baby. We will fetch it later like sensible people.
A gull drops from the roof, lands two yards from their toes, and regards them with the professional disinterest of a thief memorizing new schedules. Luca regards it back, equally professional. "We are not spectacular," he tells it. The gull blinks a slow, superior blink and hops sideways, unimpressed.
"Walk," Mira says, not yet to the bakery, not yet to the cave, but along the street that is starting to belong to other people—the school caretaker dragging a fence panel to keep children from conquering puddles, the florist propping a door with a stack of yesterday's paper, a man in a cap smoking like it's his last job.
"Walk," Luca says, answering the order with something like joy.
They do not hurry. Wet shoes talk against brick. The rain steps down from a fret to a fine thread and knots itself along the edge of his jaw. The sea, visible in the split between buildings, brightens an inch. The hotel behind them—no longer their stage, not their altar—keeps quiet the way a patient does when the medication finally takes. The broken sign is just a piece of metal. The cornice is a story for insurance, not for sermons.
At the top of the steps, he pauses once more—not because he doubts, not because he wants a look back—but because some old attention inside him lifts its head at the idea of a last chord. The faintest suggestion of keys brushes the air again, almost certainly a trick of wind on a railing, or rain in a gutter, or a neighbor somewhere touching a keyboard to see if it survived storage. It isn't a song. It's a habit looking for a host.
He smiles at Mira because he knows he is ridiculous for hearing it and because it is kinder to confess. She tiptilts one brow.
"Let it go," she says.
He does. The almost-note lies down in the rain and becomes what weather always was: honest noise. He breathes. On six.
They step off together, hand in hand, into the narrow street that will make room for them if they insist. The gulls above them wrangle the morning; a bus sighs and then thinks better of it; the bakery door swings open and a wave of heat says here. Their shoes clap a little less as the water leaves them. They are small and alive against the brightening sea, walking toward tea and towels and a room with wide windows and no mirrors, as if those were the correct saints for a town that has remembered how to wake.