"Who's there?" Mira says.
Her voice is small on purpose, the size of a key turning. The room receives it and does not echo. The radiators' low line—which had been steadying itself, building a gentle floor—stops like a heart skipping a measure. Not an off, not a clatter. A pause. The lower, bruised note holds its lip on the edge of sound and refuses to fall.
The taper's flame leans—tips—listens.
From the mirror comes a voice, and it does not arrive as if through the room. It arrives as if the silver were a throat. Warm, amused, low enough to promise he knows he's breaking a rule and expects to be forgiven: "Someone who's been waiting a very long time."
The vowel of long slides along the glass and strokes the bevel. In the central pane her mouth stays level. In the right-hand bevel her lip twitches as if she might smile without consenting. In the left-hand lag she looks a heartbeat younger. She does not flinch. She does not look at herself to check that she hasn't. Her shoulders stay where she set them. The thread from the lamp to her wrist is slack and honest.
"Then say your name," she says.
No strain, no snap on name; she keeps it clean. A simple imperative for a place that hates to be told.
Silence folds itself and sits down between her and the wardrobe.
Not absence—silence with weight. The kind an empty church keeps at noon. The beeswax flame answers by guttering once—shoulder dipped, wick momentarily drowned—then finding its balance, straightening, brightening with a restrained hiss so soft it could be a memory of rain. A single grain of salt on the sill cracks quietly as it swallows damp. The chandelier, somewhere above, resists the urge to tick.
She stands with the taper held at the same careful height, arm aching in a way that inscribes time into muscle. The rectangle of warmth she walked with the flame remains—a thin field against the glass that keeps itself because she asked it to. Within that field the condensation on the mirror does not recede. It breathes. The not-quite-mouth in the fog falters, gathers, tests itself as if tasting a word without teeth.
The radiator does not hum. The pause lengthens until absence reveals its architecture. In the pause she hears the town faintly: wheel on cobble three streets over, a gull's off-duty mutter, the buoy blinking outside the window as light without sound. The telephone chooses not to click. The lavender sachet behind the wardrobe doors keeps its sweetness under ribbon.
She lets the silence answer for him as long as it needs to. She will not fill it. People talk, panic, volunteer their names into quiet like coin into a well; rooms seldom do. She is asking the room's habit to choose a side.
The glass gives back only her three selves and the breathed-upon oval within which a handprint faintly thickens and thins. She watches the heel of that hand blur, sharpen, blur again, like a fish under clouded water turning and presenting different faces.
"Very long," the voice had said. She tries the sound of it against her bones now without moving her mouth: not old, not young, not coastal, not inland. It carries no damp of sea in it, and yet the mirror's breath lays weather down. The amusement in it had not been cruel. It had been the sort of smile you bring to a door you're sure will open.
Her forearm throbs a neat little drumbeat. She lowers the taper half an inch to ease the muscle. The flame, freed of having to stand as tall, steadies even more. It leans once, very slightly, toward the glass and then returns to plumb. The beeswax perfume sits close to the wood; the wardrobe gives back the faint sap note she had teased from it earlier, resigning a sweetness it didn't intend to.
She feels the weight of her knife in her peripheral knowing where she left it on the map-coaster's sea. She feels the red thread around her wrist as light as a hair. She feels the floorboard under her left heel want to speak and then think better of it because she has asked it not to.
Mira does not repeat herself. She does not bribe. She keeps the door of her face open the width of a question and waits.
The fog on the mirror's inner skin makes a decision. It tightens along the lower arc of the oval where a lip would draw taut, and in that tightening she reads intention. Not name, not yet. A mouth learning its edges. A tongue, perhaps, finding the limits of a foreign room. The handprint that had wandered near the corner lifts up toward that lip-shape and slides out of sight as if the hand has come to rest against a cheek.
The radiator resumes, careful as a person reentering after stepping out to listen to weather. First the low support, then the higher thread, each choosing their pitch with deliberate thought. The resumption is not an answer, not voice. It is the building saying: we did not die for your question.
A tick from the chandelier, one crystal kissing another like cutlery very far away. The bulb in the lamp whispers its filament-murmur an octave above the metal.
She lifts the taper the thickness of her thumbnail, to keep the air against the glass equally warm. She has learned, in places not like this and very much like this, that asking is heat-work. You do not hold a door open by praying at it; you warm both sides until they think they are one side.
She takes a breath without letting it master the flame. The silence that followed her request remains, but it is different now. It wears attention the way a polished table wears light. If silence could lean, this one leans as the flame did.
"Someone," he had said. Someone. Her mouth wants to shape the word coward as a test, not spoken. She smiles instead, a private thing, nothing to do with generosity. Her wrist doesn't tremble. The taper burns like it knows the price of being clumsy with names.
In the mirror, toward the bottom edge of the fog, a darker pressure blooms and lifts, moving with the same rhythm as a throat swallowing. The beveled edge snaps a ribbon of brightness across it with each little movement of her hand, making the almost-mouth look as if it wears a thread of light at its lip. The condition of the fog suggests a sound held back by nothing mechanical.
Mira tips her head the barest degree and sets her tongue behind her teeth to keep from softening the room by speaking again too soon. This is not a negotiation. This is the establishing of a grammar.
The room, if it breathes, does it through wood. The bed offers its quiet. The paper in the bedside drawer keeps its face down as if not to read. The empty hatbox in the wardrobe loft above her sightline keeps its ring of dust intact around its base as if it has settled itself there for a century. The photograph in the hall, unseen but present, holds its triangle. The man across in the lit square has either sat down again or has left his window. The buoy keeps its private cadence. Salt remains salt.
The hush stretches to the point where a lesser person would sap it by saying please. She does not. She wants the room to learn what kind of woman it has to entertain and what kind of woman it will fail to mislead.
A small click from the phone, as if it considers ringing and does not. The two notes from the radiator stitch; the seam is visible by ear only if you've learned the trick. She has.
The condensation withdraws by one breath at the top edge of the oval and thickens by the same at the bottom, as if some mouth just barely brushed, just barely left. Then nothing. The handprint is gone, or it remembers to be lighter than reason.
On the desk the match tin gleams dull red, the color of a modest wound dressed properly. On the sill the saucer holds its coarse salt with the mild dignity of a bowl that has given up on figuring out if its job is holy. Her knife lies on the printed sea with its blade pointing toward an invented cape. The thread binding the wardrobe handles together remains a loose honesty, not a trap.
The mirror keeps its made-there weather. The not-quite-mouth hovers at the edge of a word.
She lets the room's quiet rub against her. She feels it like cloth against skin in a dark wardrobe: plain weave, tightly woven, meant to survive touching without showing hands afterward. Her arm burns now in a way that will be soreness later, under the shoulder blade, and still she doesn't move more than the taper demands. She sees the faint burr on the brass key tag where it sits on the desk beside the coaster, catching a single bead of lamp light the precise size of a prayer someone else would say.
Every line of the room seems to angle toward the pane now: platform edge, desk lip, picture frame, the slant of light in the seam where the wardrobe doors fail to meet perfectly. The voices of wood are quiet. The only thing that changes is that the low note in the radiator thickens and presses for a bar as if the building's heart were held for the length of a thought and then let go. The pause returns to its shape. The air tastes like nothing more than beeswax and iron. A human name would put a different weight on it. A human name would drag warmth through the word.
She thinks of the rules she has for names—rules that have kept her from giving hers when the giving would turn a conversation into a transaction—and does not amend them now. If this voice wants the courtesy of not being a thing, it can earn it at the price everyone pays.
She thinks nothing else. She refuses to rehearse outcomes. She refuses to plant in the room any choice it can pick up and pretend she dropped.
From the mirror: not sound. Pressure. As if a palm flat behind silver pressed forward one breath, not far enough to change anything we'd call matter, only far enough for a person tuned to it to feel the world try to buckle by a hair's thickness and then recover. The flame's point narrows, sharp as a pin, then rounds, steady as if taught.
A minute movement in the left-hand bevel: her reflection there corrects its lag by a fraction, almost congruent now with the central pane. She watches that, notes it, puts it aside with the window-latch thumbprint as a thing to revisit. She does not give the mirror the climb of her pulse as gift.
The room composes itself. It refuses to cough. The wardrobe wood stays sweet. Her wrist goes cold under the red thread where sweat learns to chill. The taper's bright core beads like an eye that knows it is being watched and has resolved to be impeccable.
Still silence. Still that.
"Then say your name," she had said. She hears herself again in the room's memory, as if the words had fallen into a shallow saucer and keep a small shimmer at the bottom. She lets them sit. She will not say now. She will not say why. The mirror will tell her what kind it is by how it survives disobedience.
The fog doesn't break. It resists evaporating in the warmed rectangle she drew. The almost-lip along the bottom edge of the oval flexes once—a movement so slight that had the chandelier chosen to tick then she would have missed it—and in that flex she imagines, not a word formed, but the long breath before a word. A body gathering itself. A mouth deciding whether to give or withhold.
She holds the taper square to the glass and watches the wick's cinder bloom orange, then blacken, then bloom again. Beeswax makes its clean ledger: each second accounted for in the cup as it deepens. Out beyond the window, the buoy blinks as if its patience were infinite because it has never been asked anything else.
Somewhere below, a door to another room opens and sighs shut—the sound filtered into a memory before it reaches here. A footfall crosses slow carpeting. A faucet wakes and clamps down. The building resumes its trick of making noises you can name so that the ones that don't want names can move among them unnoticed. She refuses that trick today.
Her knuckles whiten. She relaxes them. The taper stays exact.
She thinks of all the ways he could answer that wouldn't count: I forgot, I had so many, it's complicated, the practiced coyness of men who've believed too long that being hard to pin to a single sound makes them deeper than they are. She lets each of those pale imagined answers break itself on the glass and slide away without wetting anything. She leaves the good answers alone so they have somewhere to come when they are ready.
The mirror, for its part, keeps the pressure building and then easing along the invisibly warmed frame she made with light. The ward holds like a friendly palm.
The room seems, impossibly, to lean closer.
Silence stays seated.
The flame gutters—but steadies.
His laugh, when it comes, is soft and close, and it comes not from the air but from the glass.