Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
A handkerchief.
I lean down. The placard reads: Lace handkerchief, c. 1620. English bobbin lace, linen thread. Believed to have travelled aboard the Mayflower.
Four hundred years old.
The lace is cream-coloured, finer than anything I've ever seen, the pattern so intricate that my eyes can't follow a single thread from start to finish. The edges are slightly frayed. The fabric is fragile, translucent in places, worn thin by time and touch and four centuries of surviving, and my throat goes tight, same as it always does when I see what hands can do, what hands can leave behind, and I know that makes me ridiculous and I've long since stopped apologising for it.
Someone made this with their hands. Someone sat in a room in England four hundred years ago and worked thread through pins and created something so beautiful that it crossed an ocean and outlasted empires and ended up on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, under glass, still whole, still here.
The case is open.
Not all the way. An inch, maybe. The glass lid slightly raised. Mila must have been rearranging the displays and forgot to lock it. I should close it. I should absolutely close it and walk away and go back to my cabin and go to sleep like a normal person who doesn't break into galleries at night to have emotional crises over antique textiles.
I lift the lid. And I reach in. And I pick up the handkerchief.
It weighs nothing. Less than nothing. It sits in my palm like a prayer, and the lace is cool and impossibly fine and I can feel the individual threads against my skin, each one placed by someone's fingers four hundred years before mine. And I'm standing there, perfectly still, feeling the centuries between my palm and the woman who made this, and my eyes are stinging because this is what I mean when I say my hands are the only valuable thing about me. Not because I think I'm worthless. Because I think hands are everything. Because I think the most important thing a person can do is make something, touch something, hold something with care, and this woman did that four hundred years ago and I'm holding the proof of it in my palm and I will never, ever get tired of how that feels.
I'm standing there, perfectly still, when I hear footsteps behind me.
I know them. I know his footsteps, which is absurd because he walks so softly for someone his size, but I know them like I know his scars, by feel, by instinct, by how his weight falls, and my body has already turned toward the sound before my brain authorises the movement.
"You shouldn't touch that," Artem tells me from the doorway.
"I know."
"It's four hundred years old."
"I know."
"If you damage it, it's worth more than you'll earn in a lifetime."
"I know that too." I don't turn around. I'm cradling the lace in my palm, and my voice comes out softer than I intend, hushed by the weight of what I'm holding and the nearness of what's standing behind me. "But someone made it. With their hands. And I think things that were made by hand should be held by hands sometimes, or what was the point?"
He doesn't answer.
His footsteps come closer. Soft, careful, the footsteps of a man who learned a long time ago to move through rooms without disturbing them, and he stops behind me, close, closer than the railing, closer than the corridor, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him along the entire length of my back without a single point of contact, and the hair on my arms rises and my skin is aware of every millimetre of space between his chest and my shoulders, cataloguing the distance like my thumbs catalogue his scars, precisely, compulsively, because my body has decided that his proximity is data and it wants all of it.
He reaches over my shoulder. His hand comes down into my field of vision, palm up, beside mine.
"Show me."
Two words. And how he says them, low and close, his mouth near my hair, turns them into something that has nothing to do with a handkerchief and everything to do with the fact that he's offering me his hand. The hand he pulled away. The hand he wouldn't let me touch. Palm up, open, waiting.
I lift the handkerchief from my palm and place it in his. My fingers brush his skin during the transfer, the pad of my index finger dragging across the centre of his palm, and the contact lasts two seconds and I feel every fraction of every one, the warmth and the roughness and the scar that runs across his lifeline, and something catches in my throat and I don't let it go because letting it go would make a sound and the silence right now is holy.