Chapter 235: The Next Day

Liam woke to the sound of the lane instead of the sea.

Madame Rossi’s room was already warm. A cart rattled past below the window, someone called a greeting in French, and a shutter banged open across the way.

He washed and dressed and did not go straight to the blue house. Sarah had not invited him to breakfast, and Sophie had only told him not to vanish before it.

He bought bread and fruit at the corner shop, ate on the low wall opposite the church with the crumbs falling onto the warm stone, and waited until the hour felt ordinary enough to knock.

Sarah opened the door with a cloth in her hand. She looked him over once, from his shoes to his hair, and stepped aside.

"Sophie’s on the terrace. Don’t hover."

The terrace held the same chair and the same small table. Sophie sat with her bad leg stretched out in front of her and a book open on her lap, the stick leaning within reach against the wall. She did not stand when she saw him. She marked her place with one finger.

"You came."

"You told me to."

"I told you not to vanish. That’s different." She closed the book. "Mum’s sending someone to the shop later. You can carry the bags if you want to be useful. Don’t offer to pay."

"I won’t."

She studied him a moment longer, then nodded at the second chair. He sat. The sea was a bright strip at the end of the lane, and a dog barked somewhere out of sight and thought better of it. For a while neither of them spoke.

"You look different," Sophie said at last. "Not just older. Like someone who eats."

"I do."

"In the old days you didn’t always." There were no soft edges on it. "Mum used to put extra on your plate and pretend it was a mistake."

Liam did not deny it. "She did."

"And then you were gone. No extra plate. No nothing." Her thumb moved along the edge of the book. "I used to think you’d write when you got rich. Or when you stopped being so sad. It turns out you only needed a map."

"I needed to stop being a coward about the past."She almost smiled, though it stopped short of her eyes. "At least you’re not calling it fate."

Sarah came out with a list written on the back of a receipt and handed it to Liam without ceremony. "The shop at the end of the main street. Bread, milk, the soap she likes, and fruit that isn’t soft. Sophie stays here. Her leg is stiff this morning."

Sophie did not argue, which told him more about the leg than the words had.

The shop was small and busy: two women talking across the counter, a boy stacking bottled water, the smell of yeast and soap.

Liam matched the list item for item. He paid with ordinary notes and added nothing of his own, though his hand paused over a jar of honey on the shelf by the till.

He took it as far as the counter, thought of Sophie’s don’t offer to pay, and put it back.

Then he carried the bags down the main street, past the church, and set them on the kitchen counter. Sarah checked each one, nodded, and put the milk away.

"You can water the plant on the terrace," she said. "Then you’re done. We aren’t entertaining."

He watered it. The soil was dry at the edges and drank the first pour without leaving a mark. Sophie watched him over her book and said nothing until he set the little can down.

"You still do things the long way," she said.

"How do you mean?"

"You could have hired someone to find us."

"I did, partly. A translator, for a day. The rest I walked."

"Mum told me about the empty room in Marseille. One day late." She turned a page she was plainly not reading.

"That would have finished me. Knowing I’d missed someone by a day." She closed the book again, firmly this time. "You can go. Mum doesn’t like people in the house all afternoon."

He left. At the gate she lifted two fingers in a half-wave that might have been dismissal or acknowledgment, and he did not ask which.

He spent the afternoon walking the flat ground at the edge of town. He was not following them.

He only wanted to learn the shape of the place the way he had once learned the shape of a new city, by its clinics and its bus stops and the hour its shops closed.

A clinic with a faded sign and opening hours chalked on a board, two mornings a week, which explained the exercises and the stiff leg and the patience Sarah had learned.

A bus shelter with a timetable bleached nearly blank by the sun. Laundry hung behind low walls, and a man repaired a net on a doorstep without looking up.

The quiet had nothing to prove. When he came back to Madame Rossi’s, the landlady was sweeping her step in long, deliberate strokes.

"Sarah’s girl, is she any better?" she asked.

"I don’t know yet."

Madame Rossi sniffed and went inside.

Near evening Sarah appeared at his door with a covered plate.

"Eat," she said. "Sophie made too much. She’ll deny it if you thank her."He took it. Steam had softened the cover and left it damp under his thumb. "Is she all right?"

"She is angry, and she is glad you are still here. Both can be true." Sarah glanced down the lane toward the blue house.

"Tomorrow she has the exercises the clinic gave her. She hates them. If you happen to be on the terrace and she happens not to send you away, that is her choice and not yours."

"Understood."

She left without waiting for more.

Liam ate at the small table by the window. The food was plain and good, rice and vegetables and a little fish, and it was the first meal in days he tasted.

Outside, the lane went blue with dusk and a scooter passed and faded. The few days Sarah had granted him already felt shorter than they had the night before.

He had carried bags and watered a plant and fixed nothing that mattered, and that was the point, though he was only beginning to understand how hard it was to sit inside it.

He washed the plate and set it by the door to return in the morning, then opened the window wider.

The town’s noise thinned by degrees: shutters closing, a radio turned low, someone calling a dog that did not come at once.

Somewhere behind the low wall, Sophie was dealing with a stiff leg and a history that still held his silence in it. He could not lift that in a day. He could only be where he had said he would be when the next day started.

The bag stood half packed at the foot of the bed, and he left it that way.

He sat by the window until the dark was full and the lane was only shapes, with the clean plate beside the door and, at the far end, one light still burning in the blue house.