Turn 5 of 12

Leave without writing anything

You step back from the door, and the space between you widens like a wound closing slowly. Daniel's hand stays on the chain, but his shoulder drops, some tension released that you did not know you were holding.

"Running scared already?" he says, but there is no triumph in it. The question sounds almost like hope.

You do not answer. The stairs wait below, and Mrs. Adeyemi somewhere on them, and the folio in the kitchen with its blank lines and its patient, pitiless logic. You have not written anything. This fact seems to hang in the air between you and Daniel like a promise or a threat, you cannot yet tell which.

"You'll be back," he says, not unkindly. "They always come back. The pen's heavy, but the blank is heavier." He begins to close the door, then stops.

"The word he wrote for her—content—it took her family. Did you know that? Her son stopped calling. Her daughter moved to Canada and forgot to send the address. She is content with less, and less, and less, until one day she will be content with nothing at all, and the house will have her."

The door closes. The chain slides home. You stand on the landing with the pen in your pocket and his words in your ear, and below you Mrs. Adeyemi clears her throat, a small deliberate sound.

She is two steps up from the first floor, her shopping trolley blocking the way down. She looks at you with eyes that have learned to expect disappointment from landlords, and something else besides—recognition, perhaps, of a woman standing where she once stood, before she wrote her own ending into the folio.

"You've been to see Mr. Ferris," she says. Not a question.

"He tells too much, or not enough. It is hard to know which is worse."