She waits with it. The desk's low resonance hums through the dais into her spine, a patient hand at the base of a back that has forgotten it can be held without being moved. The beeswax flame sways once and finds stillness, a thin gold stitch sewn straight along the bevels of glass and wood. The room is an ear.
Her eyelids try a blink and, finding approval, fold. A breath, then two, and the dark becomes the color behind her eyes when she's pressed a palm there to think—or not to. She keeps the mirror in her mind the way a medic keeps two fingers on a throat: lightly, insistently. The note hums; the hotel breathes; the buoy outside trades its tiny semaphore with no one who needs it. Somewhere below, a trolley wheel remembers how to be quiet.
The melody he made in the wood—the plain right hand that stepped three stairs and came back like someone checking a door they know they locked—follows her under. The left hand holds. The corridor of sleep she tells herself she isn't entering opens a crack wide enough for an eye and then, like any corridor that knows its job, widens to accommodate the body that strides into it while promising it won't go far.
A woman in a dress that could only belong to a decade that taught people to stand up straighter than they wanted to does not stand up. She leans. No—she yields. Satin with a small net of dots over it, the skirt full enough to carry its own weather, the color that black is when the room thinks it's blue. Her waist has been argued into a line by a tailor; her shoulders carry two small armies of pearls. The piano lid has been polished into a black lake; it shows her face upside down, a smudge of lipstick unresolved by the mirror in her dressing room. The glass in her right hand tilts to watch the ceiling; wine pinks its own rim, considers returning, decides against it, slips over; it is too elegant a spill to be called a pour. A pearl at her collarbone takes offense at the angle, then decides to leave. It skitters—a tick-tick-tick across lacquer so bright it returns each note she makes and corrects its pitch a little higher for charm.
Everything in the room gives an opinion: the piano (unsurprised), the dress (offended only on principle), the glass (thrilled), the pearl (free), the man in the corner (none at all, which is its own eloquence). Someone says, "Luca?" as if the name were permission to finish something. The woman does not finish anything. She bends at the waist and does not come back.
The lid receives her cheek like water that has practiced being polite for years. The pearl discovers a seam, hops it, then sits—white moon in a black lake—and considers if it will roll or simply be seen as a dot in someone's future story about a very clean instrument and a very particular woman. The music stops. The room pretends it didn't mean to be listening.
Mira's heart throws a hand against its door; that small, animal knock is what wakes her. It is not fear. It is something older than fear, the part of the body that hears a glass refuse to be upright and reads it as omen and not mistake.
Her eyes open. The world returns at the speed of heat—slow, then all at once. The candle is where she left it: a small pond rimmed in honey, wick a dark spine with a bead of red at its tip like an ember too mannered to call itself fire. The dais presses her shoulders. The bed's coverlet, pleated at the foot, tells the light what it should be doing. The desk is a good desk. The music has stopped. The note in her bones has not.
The mirror clouds from the inside.
Not the breath-white you make when you mouth your name and watch yourself refuse it. The silver behind the glass lifts a fog like a sheet someone is shaking out—one smooth unfurl—then holds. It does not trespass her warmed frame; it presses against it the way a cat presses a door it knows is latched to make sure the latch is still the world. The ripples she saw when she tied the grey thread return under the fog, as if the silver is remembering a hand's weight along its skin.
She sits up slowly, letting the dais give her back her vertical life in increments: scapula, then neck, then the back of her skull lifting from wood. Her knees draw in. Her palm finds carpet, then the floor beneath the carpet, then the seam where board meets board beneath that. She checks her own breath—speed, depth, intent. Her body lies to her less when it has a job.
On the pane, at the lower left of the fog's oval, a handprint blooms. It begins at the heel—a pale, deliberate pressure that knows it is being seen—then shows the pads of three fingers, then the fourth; the little finger is slow to decide if it belongs. The thumb arrives last. The print is delicate—not dainty, not weak; simply exact—ridges suggested in negative through two layers of surface and whatever sits between them. The span isn't small. It has worked. It has played something in its life.
Before she can name that, it goes. Not away—back. As if the hand behind it lifted, satisfied, and chose not to be recorded any longer than it takes to be sure a door is what it is.
"Don't move," Luca says, and his voice is not velvet now. It is careful wood, touched where it keeps its grain. "Please."
"I'm not," she says, and she isn't. The red thread against her wrist is slack. The grey thread makes no new speech. The candle tilts its flame as if considering a bow, then decides on uprightness. The radiator underlines the air with its low vowel.
He arrives into the glass the way day arrives at rooms that put the curtains into language years ago: not at once, and not only by light. The bevel's left-hand pane picks out an outline first—a jaw in quick graphite, an ear with no need of fuss—and the central pane takes its time, free of lag. The almost-mouth she had taught herself to see now lives where fog holds. He isn't handsome; he is a good drawing of a handsome man, which is more dangerous because economy invites imagination to help.
He hums.
Three notes. The three he played when she still pretended she was not going to close her eyes. Left hand leaning, right hand ascending, then back. He doesn't know he's doing it. He makes the sound in the bones of the desk and the bones of the pane and the bones of his—what shall she call it—presence. It passes through the wood into her back, into her teeth. She hears herself say "no" to a reflex she doesn't name and then say "yes" to the fact, which is that the dream has followed the room or the room has followed the dream, and both pretend they took the same road.
"Don't—" she begins.
"Am I—" he begins.
They stop together. The fog makes a small correction at the bottom edge and holds again.
"You're humming," she says, after a breath, low so the sound of the word won't break whatever made the handprint choose a weather.
"I am?" He's honestly pleased at the idea. "I like the thought of that. It would make me less furniture."
"It's the melody," she says. "The one you played. The one I—" She does not say took into the corridor. "—heard when I closed my eyes."
He is quiet. The hum continues, brave in its softness, like a bird in a nearby tree behind glass that pretends it doesn't reflect. He doesn't seem to know he is the throat of it.
"Tell me," he says, and for once he doesn't turn the words into invitation. "What did you dream."
She measures how much she gives and finds the answer obvious—enough to be true and not enough to become sentiment's leash. "A woman," she says. "The dress said the decade. The pearls agreed. She leaned into a piano and didn't come back. There was a wineglass that didn't want to be upright anymore. There was a pearl that performed more than it had to. The lid made a lake. Her cheek met it."
He laughs very quietly, and it isn't humor; it is the body's recognition of a detail it hadn't known it saved. "The pearl," he repeats, as if finding it under a sofa days later. The hum shifts a half-step lower and holds there; the desk perches in the new key gamely.
"Is she yours," he asks, which is not the right grammar, but it is the right question. He means: Did your family put her in this corridor too. He means: Did my corridor begin here.
"Possibly," she says. "Or no. She might be one of the lobby's three in the photograph grown into herself. She might be someone who liked front-row seats and told the room she liked them too often."
"And you heard 'Luca' in it," he says, softer, as if men should be named in a room where women fall only in physics, not in story.
"In the room," she corrects gently. "Not from her mouth. From the air. You know how rooms talk."
"It would be arrogant to claim every 'Luca' is mine." The fog at his outline loosens and tightens in thought, making the mouth in it more a possibility than a feature. "It would also be accurate, if—" He stops because accuracy requires the humility of not finishing a sentence sometimes.
"If," she says, and leaves it for him.
"If I was the one who learned how to teach mirrors to take attendance," he says, quiet and without arch. "It is an ugly pride to own a trick that harms you."
"And the handprint," she says, because she has to move him away from any sentence that uses own as a verb. "Did you feel it."
His outline sharpens a fraction. "I felt—" He tilts a thought this way and that. "I felt the way you feel when someone touches a window you're standing beside. Not here—" his voice threads the central pane, then backs off—"but at an angle. Elbow height. It was not you."
"No," she says. "It wasn't." She nearly says her and stops, because the dream's woman, for all her precise wardrobe, deserves not to be claimed by a single handprint on a single morning.
He hums the three notes again. It is almost involuntary now. The wood under the candle shivers to make room for them. The beeswax flame approves, disapproves, cannot decide, wavers an admissible amount, then stills as if embarrassed.
"You're certain you didn't push," she says. Rules matter because mornings think they don't.
"I didn't," he says at once, and the hurry in it is not defensiveness; it is pride in restraint, which is fewer men's favorite flavor than it should be. "I had a thought like an elbow that wanted to nudge the room awake, and then I remembered your corridor, and the thought knocked and sat down. That's all. If anything did any pushing, it was the dream itself. Or the thread."
"The thread doesn't push," she says. "It suggests. Quietly."
"So does hunger," he says, gentle this time. "Don't step around what the room is, or we'll both fall into it sideways."
She considers that and finds it fair. "Then we name it. The room is hungry and honest enough to admit it."
"And I am a mirror, honest enough when pushed," he adds, and manages humor without weaponizing it. "What did the dress look like. Humor me. I need to calibrate the decade."
She tells him: the dots in the net at the collarbone, the way the skirt couldn't help but carry its own wind even in still air, the satin's blue when black isn't allowed to be simply black. She tells him about the pearl hopping a seam.
He hums when she reaches the pearl again—the same three notes but with a fourth afterwards, a little tiptoe up, as if the bead's last little run deserves a grace note. "God," he says, and the word is not theology, only physics. "There used to be a woman who played here who wore a dotted net at the throat because she had a scar there she dressed like a saint's lie. She had a glass she didn't set down even when she bowed. She had a mouth that liked to pretend it had nothing to do with the laugh it made. She is not yours. She is very much the room's."
"Did she fall," Mira asks.
"She sat down incorrectly one night when the lid was not closed," he says. "We called it sitting down so we could live with it. She did not break, which seemed to offend somebody. The pearl necklace came back to the hotel three weeks later in a paper envelope without a note. Madame Corvi was not yet madame. She was a girl with hair like the satin wants to be when it grows up. She hid the envelope and wore the pearls to wash the floor."
Mira watches the fog breathe against her warmed border and refuses to call what she feels sympathy. It is accuracy with a pulse. "Do you remember her name," she asks.
"I remember trying not to," he says. "Sometimes refusal rescues you. If I knew it now, I would give it to you. But it has gone into the music with everything else. We had a pianist named Arthur then, and he laughed at nothing. He would be handsome to you in the mirror and invisible across a room. You would like him. He would not like you."
"Many men don't," she says peaceably. "They mistake lack of permission for lack of interest."
"You are not interested in most," he says, cunningly admiring without making it a trophy.
"You are not most," she returns, and the fairness of it buys them another quiet.
The handprint does not return. The fog stays. A new patch swells high on the right as if someone rethinks their angle and decides against it. The grey thread lies in profile where she tied it—a small winter line across the wardrobe's polite dark. The radiator repeats its held tone and then makes a little arrangement of taps as the valve decides on a different plan and forgets it, content.
"What else did you dream," he asks, too carefully for it to be only curiosity now.
"A wineglass," she says. "Which is only a glass. It's the hand that makes it emblem. It tipped and kept tipping as if someone had promised to catch it and then did not." She pauses. It is not her style to add the personal, but dreams license a sliver. "I don't like it when objects become omen because people won't confess clumsiness."
He hums approval for the sentence and then, not meaning to, finds a minor chord where there is no piano: the desk makes a box of his mouth and shoulders it politely. "Do you know," he says, as if they have known each other a year, "that you always speak slightly slower when you're telling the truth and faster when you're saving yourself from being a person."
She lets the criticism stand as observation. "Report your data," she says, steady.
"You said my name in your sleep," he replies, and says it with the care you take when setting glass on a ledge. "Twice. As if you were inventorying the room to keep it from changing shape. Not like prayer."
"Then my rules held," she says. "And yours."
He nods in the fog—shape without edges, assent without triumph. "The neighbors stopped before dawn," he adds like a footnote. "They are good at kindness. They will be embarrassed at breakfast and then pretend they weren't staying here at all."
The candle makes a small lick as if it's heard gossip it refuses to repeat. The buoy outside confirms that yes, time continues to be a thing we pretend to agree on. The chandelier decides now to tick, one clean kiss of glass on glass, decorous as cutlery in a careful house.
"You're still humming," she says.
"I know," he says, mildly surprised to be that honest about not knowing something. "It's in the desk now. I could stop if I tried, but it would be like pulling a thread from a sleeve while speaking to a person you like. It would look like rudeness. May I not."
"You may not push," she says. "You may keep the room company." She wipes a palm on her trouser leg out of old habit and finds beeswax scent on her skin where she has touched the candle's breath and doesn't mind.
He hums a smile into the glass. "Company," he agrees. "We keep arriving at that."
"Name for a name," she says, remembering their bargain and finding it still dignified at this hour. "Dream for a memory. I have given you mine. Give me one you would not be embarrassed to have me use against you later."
He laughs softly. "You negotiate like a person who has saved people for a living."
"Memory," she says.
"I had a suit," he says obediently. "Brown when it wanted to be black, well cut in the shoulders and too forgiving in the waist. I wore it when I thought I might be given a new job, and the job turned out to be exactly like the old job except without a window. I stood in a hallway between two mirrors that could almost see each other and decided I would never be trapped between two admirable surfaces again. I failed in that vow in the usual way."
"In love," she translates.
"In showing off," he says, and the honesty earns him another inch of corridor.
The fog at the pane's center thins as if the air has remembered an instruction. The handprint does not return, but the suggestion of a palm prints in negative along the inside border of her warmed rectangle—a touch to the invisible fence as if to say that fences have been noticed and might be admired if they are kept clean. She resists the urge to tidy the air with the candle. The ward is straight. The lines hold. You do not sweep a threshold while someone is deciding whether to use the door.
"Will you tell me hers," he asks, and the question arrives like steam, soft and not permitted to scald. "The grandmother. Later. Not now."
"I will tell you her knots," she says, keeping the shape of last night's promise exactly inside the metal of this morning. "And what she said when she set a mirror aside so it couldn't be used to take a room away."
"What did she say."
"She said, 'today this will be a picture of itself,'" Mira replies, and finds herself unwilling to paint the sentence with fondness in her mouth. She lets it be a tool. "You will like her."
"I already do," he says. "She believed in accuracy as a form of kindness."
"She believed in accuracy so she could be kind without being used," Mira corrects, then lets silence clean that sentence's edge.
The closet inside the wardrobe breathes its lavender one last time and yields to wood. The radiator offers a small change of key, a flavor of metal that says the boiler has turned its face toward the idea of morning. It is not yet morning. The room refuses day the way a woman refuses more wine when it would be rude to accept and ruder to refuse and so she smiles and puts her hand on her glass and everyone understands. The buoy blinks. The desk hums. The candle keeps a spine.
"Do you want to go back under," he asks, after a stretch of company that has no need to defend itself from words. "You woke hard."
"I woke correctly," she says. "But I could sit again."
"Sit," he says, pleased, and the notes make their small domestic circle as if they have always lived here and this is the morning they finally admit it. "I will not arrange anything. I will wait with you."
She pulls her knees up and lets her head find the dais again. She does not close her eyes. She watches the fog on the inside of the mirror learn the rule of the warmed frame and keep it. She watches the handprint fail to return and feels, in that failure, something like a promise that does not have to be spoken to remain binding. She listens to Luca hum a melody he thinks he has not claimed—left hand leaning, right hand stepping, returning—and she lets the room be what it has declared itself to be: hungry and honest and not hers to fix, only hers to measure and to choose to remain inside until the hour they agreed on remembers them both.