Chapter Five: She Left Quietly

POV: Roza

Edinburgh did not feel like running away. It felt like breathing for the first time in years. The cold here was sharper than London, but it felt honest. My new room was small. The boiler knocked at night. A bakery below opened at half past five and filled the street with the smell of bread before sunrise. A tabby cat sat on the windowsill across the street every morning, watching the world like it had nowhere else to be.

I did not miss my old life, Not for one second.

I was ten weeks pregnant. My body was already changing in small, secret ways. Tiredness hit me in waves. Certain smells turned my stomach without warning. And under all of it sat something I had not let myself feel in years. Hope. Small and careful, the kind you protect with both hands.

I found a bookshop by accident, looking for somewhere warm to sit. It sat between a dry cleaner and a chip shop, easy to walk past if you were not looking. The owner was an old man named Douglas. He wore the same burgundy jumper every day and never asked me what I wanted. He just let me sit. There was a worn velvet armchair in the back with a small heater pointed at it, and I sat there for hours some days, reading whatever he handed me. Nobody was watching me to see if I was doing it right. Nobody needed anything from me at all.

By the second week, Douglas asked me to mind the till while he ran an errand. I did. The twenty minutes turned into most afternoons. He started paying me a little. It was not much, but it made surviving feel less like a countdown and more like something I could actually build.

Then, on a Thursday afternoon three weeks before Christmas, the bell above the door rang. A man walked in shaking snow off his shoulders, looking for a book he could not find on his own. I found it for him in under a minute, from the back corner where Douglas kept the strange titles nobody else thought to look for.

He looked at me like I had done something impressive.

“You work here?”

“Sort of.”

“That is a very specific kind of knowledge for sort of.”

I did not have an answer, so I went back to the till. When he came up to pay, he had four books instead of one. I understood right away that the extra three were an excuse to stay longer.

“Soren,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Roza.” His hand was cold from outside. His eyes were grey in a way that reminded me of nothing and no one, and I noticed that fact far too fast for my own comfort.

He came back the next Tuesday. And the one after that. Sometimes he bought a book. Sometimes he bought nothing and just talked to me until Douglas gave up pretending not to watch and disappeared into the back room. He never asked why a woman with a London accent was working behind a till in Leith. He never asked about the pale mark still pressed into my finger where a ring used to sit.

He asked what I was reading. He listened like it mattered.

I told myself it meant nothing. I kept telling myself that, every week, right up until the week it stopped being true.

On the last Tuesday before Christmas, the shop filled up with people escaping the cold. Douglas asked me to bring down a stack of atlases from the top shelf, the one that needed the small wooden ladder to reach. I had done it a dozen times before without thinking. I climbed without thinking this time too.

The ladder shifted under me, One second I had my footing. The next, my foot slipped, the books went one way, and I went the other. I did not hit the floor.

Soren caught me.

His arms locked around me, hard and sudden. My hand landed flat against his chest. I could feel his heart racing under my palm, faster than it should have been for a man who had simply caught someone falling. He looked down at me. I looked up at him. For one long second, neither of us moved.

“I have got you,” he said quietly. “You can let go now.”

I did not let go right away. Neither did he.

When I finally stepped back, my legs were not steady, and it had nothing to do with the fall.

That was when he looked down. At my hand. At the pale mark still pressed into my skin where a ring had lived for seven years.

“Roza,” he said slowly. “Were you married?”

I opened my mouth to answer him.

The bell above the door rang. A woman stepped in, shaking snow off her boots, calling out cheerfully, completely unaware of what she had just walked into. “Sorry, is this the right shop? Someone told me you sell rare atlases here?”

Soren did not look away from me.

“Who were you running from, Roza?”

I said nothing at all. I looked at him and thought about seven years of never once telling anyone the truth. Seven years of swallowing every word that mattered. Seven years of silence dressed up as good behaviour.

For the first time since the night I found two pink lines and a locked door, I wanted to tell someone everything.

I opened my mouth.