Chapter 12

As if his words are the play button on a paused sitcom, the sounds of the coffee shop come roaring back. Saoirse feels more foolish than frightened, annoyed with herself for believing Emmit to be different. To be genuinely interesting. To be anything other than a creep. All his beautiful ideas and thought-provoking words, his perfectly cultivated interest in her ... it was little more than a short-lived performance before his self-indulgent—albeit creatively executed—pickup attempt.

“Riiight,” Saoirse says, and brings her mug to her lips, swallowing the last of her tea. She pushes the cup across the table, drops a ten-dollar bill from her wallet beside it, and pulls her jacket off the back of the chair.

“Hold on,” Emmit says quickly, and throws back the rest of his drink too. “I know. It sounds wild. And I didn’t mean for it to come across so creepy. I’m not saying your purpose is to inspire me or something. Like the universe delivered you to me. That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

“Really, because that’s what it sounded like.” Saoirse shrugs into her coat. “Thanks for the company, Mr. Powell, but I need to get going.”

“Mr. Powell? Oh, come on, Saoirse, don’t be like that. I didn’t want to imply that my intuition, my feeling, whatever the hell you want to call it, meant that I thought we were going to be together . I just meant that any opportunity to see more of you, to get to know you, was an exciting prospect on par with writing my first novel. It’s a compliment.” As soon as he says it, he cringes. “I’m making it worse. I don’t want to be that guy, telling a woman how to take the things he says. I have zero expectations. I just hoped—I hope —that our impromptu run-in this morning would be the beginning of something. A friendship, perhaps. That’s all! Please don’t—”

He pauses and goes to put a hand on her arm, then stops himself and looks her in the eyes. “I don’t have many friends. They’re all in Maryland. You probably don’t know this—well, of course you don’t know this, but I live there. In Baltimore. I’m only in Providence half the week to teach my classes. That’s how little I meant for you to take what I said as an invitation—a preordainment—for us to start dating. My whole life—aside from this teaching position—is in Baltimore.” He sighs. “I’m really sorry. I guess I got excited by the prospect of having someone cool in this city I could occasionally have a cup of tea with.”

Saoirse is moved in spite of herself. Maybe he didn’t mean for what he said to come out the way it did. But between the admission of his strange “feeling” and the lingering memories of him staring at her from across the library, from atop her basement ceiling, Saoirse doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to go home. Emmit may be telling the truth about wanting to make friends in Providence, but the whole interaction has taken a turn for the weird.

She’s ready to bury herself in blankets, to recover from last night’s excitement, the all-night writing session, the unexpected one-on-one interaction today. She’s supposed to meet Lucretia and Roberto tomorrow at an animal shelter Mia recommended. This is the last evening she will be without the responsibility of taking care of a cat—or maybe even a kitten. She wants nothing more than to watch Netflix until her eyes burn and crash into bed.

“I’m not leaving because of what you said,” Saoirse lies. “It’s just, I have something planned for tomorrow. I need to go home and get a few things ready.” She holds her hand out. Looking miserable, Emmit shakes it. He tries to give her the ten-dollar bill back, but she shakes her head. “Put whatever’s leftover toward the tip.”

Emmit nods once, a heavy, tired movement. “I would offer to walk you out—walk you home, even—but I have a feeling that might make things worse.”

Saoirse gives him a wry smile.

“Could we at least agree that this won’t be the last time we see each other? I don’t dare ask for your number, but would you consider taking mine? I really enjoyed talking with you today.”

Saoirse pauses, having already taken two steps away from their table. Their waitress is eyeing Emmit from the pick-up station, no doubt wondering if this is the end of a first date gone bad. Let her wonder, Saoirse thinks. Hell, let her come over and pick up where I left off. “I’m sorry,” Saoirse says to Emmit. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He bites his lip. “I understand. I’m sorry I weirded you out.”

His expression is so morose, Saoirse almost reconsiders. Then she reminds herself that he’s already lied to her once, about his motive in coming up to her in Chafee Garden. “You did,” she says firmly. “But it was nice talking to you up until then. And who knows ...” She stares at his downturned face until he lifts his gaze, his brown eyes—so dark they’re almost black—locking on to hers. “We’ve run into each other three times already. If we happen to meet a fourth, maybe I’ll be more inclined to believe in your theory of ‘premonition.’”

She walks off before he can say anything else, wondering if she’s made a mistake. Providence is not a large city, and she and Emmit have run into one another an absurd number of times. Now if she sees him again, she’ll be all but obligated to join him for tea or maybe even a meal.

“That won’t happen,” she whispers and steps onto the sidewalk. It is a shame. She did enjoy spending time with him, before he got all Twilight Zone on her.

She walks home quickly and, once there, exchanges her sheer blouse and tight pants for threadbare leggings and an old Brown sweatshirt. She makes for the couch, but before she can get there, the decision as to whether to finish the conspiracy sci-fi show she’s been watching or start a new stand-up special featuring a comic she enjoys is replaced by another thought. Not a thought but, specifically, a sentence:

Unbroken silence turns one’s soul away from the shores of discontent.

Saoirse stops halfway across the room. Another first line. An invitation to tell a story in trochaic octameter. Isn’t the best-known work in trochaic octameter Poe’s “The Raven”? Why is this the meter I’m thinking in?

She looks longingly at the television, but it’s too late. The first, fat raindrop has fallen from the storm cloud of her creativity, and that cloud is threatening to open whether she’s ready or not. She backtracks out of the room and up the stairs, then hurries to her desk, where her notebook and pen still sit from the night before. Conscious thought falls away. The words pour out of her.

She writes poem after poem, four in all, occasionally pausing to spin in her chair and look behind her, certain the feeling of being watched she keeps experiencing will turn out to be the ghost of Sarah Whitman—she’s too content in this moment to fear Aidan Vesper turning up, as she had before—but each time she turns, the only eye upon her is the moon beyond the balcony doors, moving silently through the star-crusted sky. When she’s done, a dull ache pulses in her palm and her mind alights from one thought to the next with the bouncy changeability of a butterfly among wildflowers. The clock reads 4:00 a.m. She goes to the bathroom, chugs ice-cold water from the tap, and falls into bed.

Her dreams are full of dark, disturbing imagery: a black-clad figure holding a woman in white against a towering, moss-covered gravestone. A ghost-white woman holding the bloodied corpse of a raven. A woman whose visage has been replaced by a ream of parchment paper on which lines of poetry are being written with a knife-sharp quill by an unseen hand.

Finally, after what seems like hours of cemeteries blanketed by mist and marigold-colored leaves, of specters rising from ghostly, whispering seas, Saoirse’s mind goes blank. She sleeps in an endless, noiseless expanse of blackness and is still sleeping long after the sun rises.