My heart was going so fast. We can say so many words sometimes and never say a thing. If you close your eyes you could be anywhere and that is always true.

A tram came and he got on it, the number twelve. He pushed the stroller easily, held E easily with his other hand. They would be fine. He could even make them dinner. M had always been a good cook. A really surprisingly good one. Back when he was in grad school he used to make bread dough in the mornings and it would rise all day and make our apartment smell like yeast and honey.

Once he cooked us a steak that cost him as much as I made in a whole day and we ate it sitting on the back porch off paper plates balanced on our knees. Once we went camping and forgot our tent. Once he bought me a book that was just exactly the one I wanted and I thought that no one could have known that I would have loved just exactly that one but me. Once he had a green car that I had to push down the block to get started and then run around to the passenger side and jump in before he put it in gear. Once he asked his grandmother to teach him to sew and he sewed me a shirt and I wore it, even though it was terribly made and much too large for me, for months, until one of the sleeves actually fell off while I was at work. All these things were true about him. All these things were true about me too.

I was alone on the street in front of the shop. I felt naked and out of place without a stroller in front of me. It was as if there was nothing left to explain me, nothing left to help make sense of me at all. I almost ran after M, after the tram, but that would have been silly and I’ve always, to be honest, had a horror of creating a scene, so it seemed that the only thing to do was to go inside the shop. Sometimes we’re just left aren’t we? Sometimes the only thing to do is the thing we said we would.

It was an old shop that sold linens, the best. Hydrocotton double-weave towels from Denmark. Tablecloths, table-squares and runners from Ekelund. It was the kind of place where the shop girl might ask you whether you preferred to sleep on sheets made from French, or Belgian, flax. I really had been meaning to go for some time. Everything that I had said to M had been true.

I went straight to the bed linens and touched them. I put my hands all over them. I slipped my fingers in between the folded stacks of them. A shop girl came over and began telling me the names of each kind of sheet, explaining to me the different washes. Stone wash to save the colour, vintage wash for sheets that never aged, cotton wash for soft and bright and new. Then she started to show me the possible colours, lifting up the folded sheets one by one and holding up a corner, to show me how they, each differently, caught the light.