I had put the notebook on the bed because I was finished with the desk. Ten minutes later I was sitting on the edge of the mattress, bent over the same page.
Two days had passed since the Duke's test. I had spent them practicing so cautiously that there was almost nothing to put in the columns: a little breathing, a few turns, the point at which I stopped. Getting through the demonstration had not made the stairs easier. Tonight I had reached my room and remained beside the door until I could take off my coat without hurrying.
The last entry said that recovery was slow. I considered changing it to slower. I hadn't measured it properly, and the difference seemed likely to matter to someone who would never be reading this notebook.
I closed it.
On the bedside table, a cup waited under a small cloth. The servant had left it within reach and turned the handle toward my good hand. I took away the cloth, then shifted the cup farther from the edge. Someone had once made me do that in a hospital corridor. A cart needed to get past, and I had been sitting with a drink balanced on the arm of my chair as though that part of the corridor belonged to me.
Two paper cups. Mine had folded a little beneath my thumb. I had carried them both from the machine because Hana said the tea was too strong unless I remembered to add water, and remembering was apparently beyond the machine.
I could see the place outside her room where I used to stop and listen before going in. There was never any good reason for doing it. Sometimes she was talking. Sometimes there was a television. That afternoon she had been asleep with her phone against the blanket, and I had set the cups down without waking her.
June's message lit the screen.
I picked up the phone, read it, and started answering. It was about the play. A recording they needed to redo, or a pause Hana had moved; I could remember June's name on the screen better than the exact complaint. I had begun to tell her Hana was resting when a hand appeared beneath the phone.
"Give it here."
"I'm just telling her—"
"I know. I can see."
I finished the word I was typing. Hana kept her hand out.
She looked younger when she had just woken up. Four years was usually not enough of a gap for her to let me get away with anything, but in that moment I had felt entitled to decide which messages she needed to answer.
"You can do it later," I said.
"Then I'll do it later."
I gave her the phone. She looked at what I had written, deleted it, and held the screen close while she composed her own answer. I sat down. The chair complained so loudly that she stopped typing to look at it, and then at me.
"That," she said. "We need that."
"The chair?"
She nodded and reached for the recording control. I moved my weight. Nothing happened. I tried again and got a short, ordinary creak.
"It was better when you weren't helping."
She went back to June's message. I sat very still for perhaps half a minute, then shifted without thinking. The chair made the noise again. This time she wasn't recording either.
I remembered her face when she laughed at that, the way she pressed her lips together because she didn't want to encourage me. The tea waited beside the bed until I reminded her. She took one sip, said it was cold, and drank some more.
The cup in my hand had cooled as well. I set it down and opened the notebook at the back, past the last page with calculations on it.
At first I wrote that Hana had been stubborn. I looked at the word, put a line through it, and wrote what I had actually done with her phone. The nib scratched in the quiet room. Holding it far back spared my finger, but it made the letters larger than I wanted; her name took up more room than any of the technique headings.
I added the chair. Then the kettle, because I could still hear the dreadful whistle she had insisted on keeping in the unfinished play with June. My cleaner version had sounded like a kettle. That had been the problem. Hers let the captain mistake it for something enormous and very far away.
I stopped before trying to write the whole joke. I would have had to explain the bad line before it, and the pause, and why June sounded so pleased with herself. Hana would have told me I was making it too long.
There was another sound I could put down: two taps on the mug, her fingernail marking a new take. I had already caught myself waiting for those taps at breakfast here. I wrote the detail without giving it a heading. The page was beginning to look less tidy than the ones in front.
For a while I watched the ink lose its shine.
I thought of my mother at the kitchen table, taking off one work shoe beneath her chair while she moved the chipped blue bowl toward me. I heard the tired roughness in her voice and that small pause before my name.
I wrote, 'Eat while it's warm, Kael. I'm here.'
I tried reading it softly. The words came out in Cedric's voice, which was so wrong that I stopped halfway through. In my head I could still hear her properly. I wrote a little pause before Kael, then added that she had asked me to move my elbow so she could put her own bowl down.
The pen left a dot after the last word. I had run out of anything to add without beginning again.
A board creaked in the corridor. I turned the notebook over, waited for the footsteps to pass, and listened as somebody tried a door farther along. The house went quiet again. When I picked up the notebook, I opened it to check that the ink hadn't marked the other page.
It hadn't. I left the book open on the bedside table and moved the cup to make room. Then I lay down, keeping my right hand flat on the coverlet. After a while I remembered the tea, but I was comfortable enough at last that I let it go cold.