The museum was called the Harwick. Medium-sized, serious, the kind of place that smelled like old paper and climate-controlled air and the specific silence of things that have outlasted everyone who made them.
Claire arrived twelve minutes early and immediately regretted it.
She stood in front of a painting she had seen twenty times before — a Dutch interior, seventeenth century, a woman reading a letter by a window — and stared at it without seeing it. Her coat was still on. Her bag was on her shoulder. She had not moved in four minutes.
This is a mistake, she thought. This is a specific and identifiable mistake that I am making with full awareness.
She had met James two years ago in her History of Ideas seminar. He had sat in the third row and asked questions that were too good — the kind that made the other students shift in their seats because suddenly the conversation had gone somewhere none of them had prepared for. She had noticed him the way you notice a word you don't know: with a small, involuntary attention.
Then the semester ended. Then another began. Then he graduated, and she shook his hand at the department reception, and that was supposed to be the end of it.
Then, six weeks ago, he emailed her.
Not about anything academic. Just: I saw an exhibition at the Harwick. There's a room at the back — medieval manuscripts, mostly ignored — that I think you'd find unreasonably interesting. Would you want to see it? No agenda. Just the room.
She had stared at that email for three days before replying.
No agenda, she thought now, checking the time. Sure.