By Thursday afternoon, the missing trousers had acquired the power to make Iris doubt every cupboard she opened.
The alterations department was not badly run. That was the explanation she kept making to nobody, which suggested she no longer entirely believed it. Customers’ clothes were tagged. Repairs were logged. Finished work lived in the tall cupboard, and work awaiting something lived on a separate rack.
Except when the rack was full. Except when the cupboard lock stuck. Except when Winnie had flu, Hugh had a delivery, a customer needed something urgently, and Iris knew she would remember where she had put the bag.
Daniel found her on a low stool, looking through a stack of flattened cartons.
“Are you appraising those?” he asked.
“They have considerable historical significance.”
“Can I help?”
She told him about Arthur and Philip, then the trousers. Saying it aloud made the loss feel both more real and more manageable.
He crouched beside her.
“Where have you looked?”
She showed him the list she had begun keeping after searching the same shelf three times.
“Good list,” he said.
“You sound like a primary-school teacher.”
“I’d be a terrible one.”
“Too many blunt pencils?”
“Too many questions I couldn’t answer.”
He took off his jacket and hung it on the door hook. Iris watched him fold his sleeves back, remembering his hand at her waist and the warmth of his mouth in the rain.
He caught her looking.
“Is something wrong?”
“No.”
A beat passed.
His expression changed, just enough. He came nearer, one hand resting on the edge of the shelf behind her.
“Good.”
She stood up. He kissed her once, not tentatively, then stepped back before the small room could make either of them careless.
Iris reached for the list.
“That won’t improve the filing.”
“It improved something.”
She laughed, and they began.
They found a box of gloves that belonged to the store, a pair of shoes that belonged to no one willing to admit it, and an embroidered cushion Winnie had promised to finish for her niece in 2019. The cushion had not progressed since.
At four, Hugh came up to see whether they needed anything from the dock.
“Arthur Mercer’s trousers,” Iris said.
Hugh considered this without visible surprise.
“Did they go out?”
“What?”
“For a repair. We used to take things to Rita when Winnie was off.”
Iris sat back on her heels.
Rita had replaced zippers, repaired linings and quietly saved the alterations department through two busy seasons before retiring to Maine. Her outgoing work had a separate book downstairs because Hugh handled the deliveries.
“I thought we brought all of that back.”
“We did,” Hugh said. “Whether it all got upstairs is another matter.”
They followed him to the dock.
The outgoing repair book listed Arthur Mercer, navy trousers, fastening adjustment. Returned October 3. Signed I. Bell.
Iris stared at her own signature.
“I took delivery.”
“There you are,” Hugh said. “Can’t be far.”
She searched her memory for October 3. A day of the week, a customer, a crisis. There were too many ordinary days she had relied on remembering.
Daniel pointed to a note beside the signature.
“Button?”
“Yes. We were waiting for a matching button. The original fastening wasn’t strong enough after the waist adjustment.”
“Would that have gone to haberdashery?”
The little counter had closed in November. Its remaining stock was in a storeroom on the fourth floor.
Iris shut the book.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
The box was on the second shelf, between embroidery hoops and lengths of elastic, labeled in her own handwriting: WAITING FOR BUTTONS.
The button was there too. A small envelope stapled to the ticket, with a packet of four inside. All the components of an easily completed task, waiting for a woman who had been certain she would remember.
For a moment she could only stand holding it.
Daniel did not say that everybody made mistakes.
Hugh took the empty box from her.
“I’ll bring the rest of these down for checking,” he said. “There might be someone else’s trousers up here.”
“Thank you.”
“We’d better not tell Winnie about the cushion.”
“I heard that,” came a voice from the stairs.
Winnie arrived carrying a dust cloth and an expression of vindication. She examined the packet, then Iris’s face.
“Well,” she said. “We’ve found them.”
“I signed for them.”
“Yes.”
“I should have checked.”
“Yes.”
Daniel stood quietly beside the shelf. Iris found herself grateful to both of them for allowing the mistake to remain real without making it a verdict on her whole working life.
Downstairs, she sewed the button on herself. She checked the seams, brushed the trousers and hung them with the jacket.
The suit was whole again. It seemed a small thing to offer a man who had lost so much, but it was the thing he had asked for.
At closing she wrote a simple plan for checking all the held goods against both ledgers before the final fortnight. She split the work between herself, Winnie and Hugh, allowing time on the schedule rather than leaving it to whoever felt most guilty at six o’clock.
Daniel waited while she finished.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
She put the pen down. “Good. I want to ask you something.”
He leaned against the doorframe.
“Dinner tomorrow. At my house. I’d cook.”
His face warmed in a way that made her wish she had asked sooner.
“I’d like that.”
“It won’t be elaborate.”
“I’ve seen how much you accomplish on three bites of sandwich. I’m prepared.”
She smiled. “Seven?”
“Yes.”
He walked her to her car. In the parking garage, their footsteps echoed between concrete pillars. It was not a romantic place. A fluorescent tube flickered overhead, and someone had abandoned a trolley beside the payment machine.
Daniel took her hand anyway.
“Do you like cooking?” she asked as they walked.
“Sometimes.”
“What do you cook?”
“A very reliable chicken dish. Eggs. Things that can be made in a pan before I start thinking about ordering food.”
“That’s an impressive range.”
“I didn’t claim a range.”
She laughed. At her car they stood facing each other, neither reaching for the practical end of the conversation.
His thumb moved over the back of her hand.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
She kissed him this time, putting her other hand at the side of his face. The brief rasp of his evening stubble beneath her palm was so intimate that she nearly closed her eyes before his mouth reached hers.
He drew her closer. The kiss deepened, unhurried and unmistakably hungry. She felt it all the way through her body, a warmth that had nothing to do with being admired and everything to do with wanting him.
When she moved back, his hand remained at her waist.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said.
“So have I.”
He smiled, a little breathlessly. “It’s becoming distracting.”
“Good.”
At home, she wrote a shopping list. Pasta. Tomatoes. Salad. Bread. Wine.
Then she looked up a recipe she’d once made often and stopped making because Colin found it too garlicky.
She added garlic to the list and underlined it.
On Friday evening she burned the first pan of garlic.
It was spectacularly easy. She turned away to answer a message from Beth, and by the time she looked back the pan contained dark, bitter little pieces of evidence that desire had not improved her concentration.
She opened the kitchen window, scraped the pan and began again.
Daniel arrived while she was chopping the second lot. He carried wine and a paper bag from a bakery.
“Something smells good.”
“Not the first thing.”
He looked at the open window, then the pan in the sink.
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
“All right.”
He hung his jacket on the back of a chair and asked for a chopping board. She gave him salad vegetables and tried to stop being conscious of another person using her knife.
“Tomatoes in wedges?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He began cutting them into small, precise pieces.
“Those are not wedges.”
He looked down. “Apparently I had a different plan.”
“I’m beginning to recognize that.”
He smiled without stopping. She stole a piece of tomato from the board.
They ate by the window, the garden fading behind the glass. The pasta was good, the salad too finely chopped, the wine better than either of them required. Daniel told her about a house he’d appraised where every drawer had been labeled, including one marked MISCELLANEOUS MISCELLANEOUS.
“That would be my whole house,” Iris said.
“I doubt it.”
She pointed toward the hall. “Three keys I can’t identify. A battery that might be dead. A receipt for something I no longer own.”
“Historic collection.”
“Beyond price.”
After dinner he washed while she dried. He splashed water over his cuff and swore softly, then looked at her as if she’d caught him misbehaving.
“I have heard it before,” she said.
“I’m sure.”
“You can say it again if it helps.”
He did, very quietly. She laughed so suddenly that the plate slipped in her hands. He caught it over the sink.
“Excellent teamwork,” he said.
“Appalling supervision.”
They were both still smiling when he put the plate down and turned toward her.
This kiss did not need asking for. She set the dish towel aside, and he stepped into the space she’d made.
His hands settled at her waist, then moved slowly up her back. She put her arms around his neck. The kitchen light shone through the open blind, the tap dripped once, and the world became the shape of his body against hers.
She kissed him until she could no longer pretend she had invited him only for dinner.