The Wrong Hour

By the third week I had learned which drawer held the soft weights and which tram was full of children at eight in the morning. I was learning a third thing less quickly: a day could be good without Felix hearing about it before I slept.

The jacket had gone back into its box with my examination record. Mette had given me a silk scarf with a worn edge and asked for a treatment proposal, not a treatment. I spent two mornings measuring loss and one afternoon discovering I had used the wrong light to read a dark mend. Nothing had been damaged. I had to write that I had changed my assessment, and Mette signed her name beneath mine.

“You can be wrong here,” she said. “The record has to show how you became right.”

I liked her for that. I liked the work even when I walked home…