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Mornings had lost their rhythm since Richard died. There was nothing and no one to cue her in, just silence settling into the corners of the house like a squatter. Despite or perhaps because of his absence, Margaret, Maggie to some of her friends, filled her hours listening to birdsong through the kitchen window, preparing her meals with care, calories counted, and a glass or two of Chardonnay before noon. The last she continued to call prepping for rehearsal. Old habits could be a form of scaffolding.

She joined an amateur dramatic society that met on Tuesday evenings in a drafty hall behind the library. In her thoughts, she told Richard how it smelled of dust, instant coffee, and the particular nervousness of people who wanted to be good at something. Margaret hadn’t acted in years, but when she saw the notice pinned to the board—When the Wind Blows, auditions open—she felt the familiar tug of a muscle remembering what it was for.

She was cast as Hilda, which surprised no one. She had the voice for it, the calm authority, the careful optimism that could sound like sense even when it wasn’t. During read-throughs, she sat upright, script balanced on her knee, listening without criticism as the others stumbled into the play’s peculiar rhythms—its cheerfulness, its faith in instructions, and its quiet refusal to see what was coming.

“The important thing,” the director kept saying, “is that they believe what they’re saying without a trace of irony.”

Margaret nodded, pencil poised. Some of the lines sat awkwardly in her mouth. They’ve thought of everything. It’ll all be fine. But she practiced them anyway, smoothing the edges and trusting that if she found the right tone, the meaning would follow.

It was her sister Helen who installed the dating app. Helen, with her brisk voice and Girl Guide shoes. Helen, who treated grief like muddy water: stir it up, tip it out, move on. Helen spoke about it with authority, as she did about most things. Margaret let Helen boss her around because it made her feel marginally better than she was, and since Richard died, that small advantage felt like solace enough.

“You need a man who still thinks you’re a bit of a mystery,” Helen said, tapping through an array of profiles with the quick assurance of a casting director. “Someone who hasn’t seen everything yet.”

Margaret laughed. Most men her age had either seen practically everything already or, if they hadn’t, weren’t worth knowing. But she didn’t disagree because resistance could be a lonely sport.

When George appeared on the screen—silver-haired, broad-shouldered, smiling with what looked like restraint—she felt a small, involuntary shiver, the kind that preceded an entrance onto the stage. He said he was a surgeon. Widowed. Working with Médecins Sans Frontières in South Sudan. Maggie noticed how he wrote in full sentences, used commas in the right places, asked questions and then waited for the answers. After years of being spoken over, this attention felt almost indecent. As she later told Helen, there was something noble about him, something reassuringly old-fashioned. It had been decades since anyone had spoken to her as if her attention were something earned rather than assumed, and Margaret found that she liked it. When she caught her reflection in the mirror, she noticed she was standing a little straighter.

“He makes me feel as if I matter,” she said, and her reflection did not contradict her.

They messaged. Then called. Then video-called, though the video was unreliable, freezing mid-sentence or collapsing into sound alone. George blamed the connection, the camp generators, and the dust. He compensated with long messages that arrived overnight, quoting Rilke and Neruda, remembering her birthday, asking about her garden and the quality of the light at dusk. Margaret knew how improbable it all was. She wasn’t naïve. But improbability had never stopped her believing in theatre, or love, or the idea that something might still begin after so much had ended.

“If I weren’t halfway across the world,” he wrote, “I’d be cooking you dinner and then suggesting something I shouldn’t.”

She wanted to respond immediately, but instead closed the app and stared at the wall. She had waited a year before letting Richard into her bed, though not because she hadn’t let others in before. She thought about her hesitation and decided that some things were worth waiting for. In any case, she was still considering a boob lift, and if she was going to make herself available, she wanted to do it at her best.

At rehearsal the following evening, she picked up her cues smoothly, and the director was pleased. “Perfect,” he said.

On the drive home, her phone vibrated. George had written again, apologetic and restrained, his usual warmth edged with formality. She didn’t answer at once, but instead found herself rehearsing various responses. When she finally replied, her words arrived with unexpected ease, as if she had said them before.

Lin Wei hated the script, though not because it was difficult. It wasn’t. He had learned it quickly—the rhythm of concern, the calibrated warmth, the pauses placed like commas where silence was meant to do the work. He knew when to soften his tone, when to praise and when to let a message sit unanswered just long enough. Even the typos, rare and carefully placed, were deliberate.

Margaret — she’d said he could call her Maggie, though he thought Margaret suited her better—responded with heart emojis. The women before her had often done that too. He logged the response and continued.

The room where Lin worked was long and narrow. He wore a headset that pressed against the crown of his head, leaving a dull ache by the end of the day. Around him, other men typed steadily, their faces pale in the glow of their screens. Someone coughed. Someone laughed too loudly, and Lin accepted it as part of a script. He didn’t need to look up to know that the humming banner above them said: EMOTIONS ARE CURRENCY. The words had been there when he arrived and would still be there when he left.

Uncle Gao had recruited him six months earlier. “Temporary employment,” he’d said. “English good? I know you like women.”

With each job, Gao gave him an anglicized name, a face, and a history. He explained escalation, when to disappear, when to return apologetic, how to offer closeness without commitment, and how to talk about urgency without numbers. He told Lin not to worry about how he looked; the video calls were pre-recorded with European actors, and the lighting was adjusted to each situation. Lin had watched the clips so often he could repeat them scene by scene.

Margaret was his fourth target. The first three had gone smoothly—or efficiently, as Gao liked to say. The problem with Margaret was that she wrote differently, and about things he didn’t know. She wrote about theatre and how hard it was when the applause faded too quickly. She wrote about grief not as pain exactly, but as an atmosphere that followed her from room to room. Once, she described light as a person who could sometimes be too strong.

Lin found himself rereading her messages, not out of sentiment—he was careful about that—but because something in her language slowed him down and interrupted the usual flow. It reminded him of a time when words were offered without an outcome attached.

Sometimes he took the work home, and Jiao spoke to him from the doorway while he typed. He answered without turning, his voice softer than normal, the same register he used for writing as George. Jiao usually stood there for a moment, knowing who he was messaging, then left. Lin kept typing.

Late at night, with Jiao lying beside him, Lin sometimes allowed himself to imagine living in America, and specifically New Jersey, where his cousin Leo would let him sleep on a sofa. This would be a life that required fewer performances.

One night, unable to sleep, he slipped out of bed and typed, I wish I could hold you. When he pressed send, he imagined Margaret at her kitchen table, a cup cooling in front of her. They had talked about tea and how Earl Grey tasted like soap. He imagined her face and tried not to imagine what might happen if she stopped writing back.

Margaret’s days acquired a new shape without her quite noticing. Messages arrived in the morning and again in the evening. She began to anticipate them, arranging her time so that she would be free when they arrived. She caught herself carrying the phone from room to room and setting it down carefully, face up, as if it might be about to speak.

At the next rehearsal, the hall was colder than usual. Someone had forgotten to turn the heating on, and they worked in coats, their breath visible as jets of steam as they spoke. Things did not go smoothly this time. The director stopped her more than once.

“The point is not knowing,” he said. “You don’t play the fear. You play the trust.”

Margaret nodded, though there was one particular line that unsettled her. They’ve thought of everything. She found it was easier to say if she didn’t think too hard about what came next.

At home, she drafted a reply to George and deleted it, then drafted another. She wanted to sound steady, not solicitous; interested, but not demanding. When she finally sent the message, it felt less like writing than like repeating something she had already rehearsed.

Helen rang while she was making supper. “So how’s the surgeon?”

“Fine,” Margaret replied.

She didn’t mention the long messages or the way she sometimes reread them before bed. She didn’t say how tiring it was to care from a distance and to hold someone else’s worry without anywhere to put it. After the call ended, she stood at the sink, watching the dishwater run down the drain, and the sink become clear.

Later, George wrote again. He said he hadn’t slept much. He admitted there were days when the work felt endless, and knowing what was needed made the lack of it harder to bear. I don’t usually tell people this, he wrote. It doesn’t help anyone.

She read the message twice, then once more, this time more slowly.

Is there anything I can do? she typed, then paused, her thumb hovering. She thought of the cold rehearsal hall, the script, and the careful optimism of her lines. She thought of how effort, properly applied, was supposed to lead somewhere. She left the message unsent and went to bed.

The trouble with delays, Lin discovered, was that they created their own weight. He had been told not to mention money yet. Not directly. Instead, he was to talk about how tired he was, about systems under strain, and about the quiet frustration of knowing what was needed and being unable to provide it. He knew he was good at this. He had learned how to let sentences trail and imply scarcity without naming it.

Margaret responded with sympathy first, then reassurance. Then she wrote about her rehearsals, not in detail, just enough. Tuesday evenings in a hall behind the library. He didn’t know the play, but when he looked it up, he understood that it was about faith in instructions, about doing what one was told and trusting that it would be enough. His understanding made him feel closer to what she was saying because he had grown up with rules that were not meant to be questioned. He wrote back carefully, matching her tempo.

Lin was worried because now there were gaps. Hours when Margaret did not reply. He filled them with imagined explanations: her rehearsals, her unreliable car, her arguments with her bossy sister Helen. When she finally messaged him, he remembered Gao’s lesson about applying pressure, but carefully.

An hour later, he wrote that the clinic had lost a shipment. I shouldn’t complain, he added. Everyone is doing what they can.

Margaret replied almost at once. It must be exhausting to care so much and feel so limited.

Lin stared at the sentence for longer than usual, opened the escalation template, then closed it. The cursor blinked in the empty space where he was supposed to turn need into a number. He let it blink a moment longer than protocol allowed, then copied in the next line of comfort and hit send.

At the next rehearsal, Margaret missed a cue. No one gasped, no one laughed, but the pause was long enough for the director to glance up. “Again, please,” he said mildly.

They began from the top of the page, and this time Margaret kept her eyes on the script, tracing her line with her finger as it approached. When she spoke, her voice was steady, but she felt the effort of holding it there, which was unusual.

Afterwards, in the car park, she dug around in her bag for her keys and checked her phone without quite looking at it. The night air smelled of damp leaves and petrol. Someone called goodbye. She raised a hand in reply, but everything seemed acted and artificial.

At home, she reheated leftovers and ate standing at the counter. The house felt too quiet. She scraped what remained into the compost bucket, slid the plate into the dishwasher, watched the water begin its careful work, then wiped down a surface that was already clean. She knew she was delaying the moment when she would finally look at her phone. When she did, there was nothing new.

She opened the message she hadn’t sent earlier. Is there anything I can do? It looked different now, less generous than she’d intended. She tried to imagine how it might land, as concern, perhaps, or as intrusion. She closed the app.

Life with Richard had, in the end, been predictable. She had known how he would react, what to avoid, and where the edges were. It might have been boring. “But at a certain age, boring is not all bad,” she said aloud, then laughed softly, surprised by how much like Richard she’d sounded. “I miss you,” she said to the room. “I don’t need another man in my life.”

Later, she lay in bed listening to the house settle. The line she kept stumbling over came back to her. They’ve thought of everything. She wondered, not for the first time, how often she had said similar things in her own life, and what she had meant by them at the time.

In the morning, she woke earlier than usual, when the light was just beginning to thin the dark at the window. She reached for her phone, then stopped. Instead, she got up and made tea, letting it steep longer than she liked, until it tasted of metal.

By mid-morning, there was a message from George. He thanked her for listening. He apologized, again, for the heaviness of it all. Some days it helps just to say it out loud, he wrote. Most people don’t want to hear.

Margaret felt the familiar tightening in her chest—not fear, exactly, but something closer to responsibility, the sense of being on the inside of something. She began to type. Stopped. Began again. She wrote that she had thought carefully about what he’d said, and that she understood how difficult it was to work within limits that weren’t of one’s making. She said she could help, cautiously, from her pension, and that she trusted him to tell her if what she was proposing was wrong.

The amount took a moment to settle in her mind. Not because it worried her, but because it fitted so easily into her monthly pension, as if the number had been chosen by someone else. Maggie logged into her banking app, checked the digits twice, then pressed confirm with the same careful pressure she used to keep her voice steady in rehearsal. The £2,800 transfer was completed. The screen refreshed. A message appeared: the transaction could not be reversed.

At rehearsal that evening, the hall was still cold and the lighting unkind, but when the line came, she didn’t hesitate.

“They’ve thought of everything.”

This time, she said it as it was written. She didn’t search for meaning. The director nodded, satisfied, and moved them on.

In the office, Lin watched the confirmation appear beside her name. He recorded the amount; the account was reassigned in accordance with protocol. It was his last day with Margaret. Accounts were rotated at fixed intervals to prevent drift; but the script remained unchanged. Tomorrow, someone else would be George, and for a moment, he felt almost protective.

Lin removed his headset and stood with the others as they gathered their things. He thought of Jiao at the counter, preparing vegetables for the evening meal. He followed the flow toward the lifts, his phone dark in his pocket.

At the rehearsal, the director stopped Maggie just before the end of her scene. “Don’t rush it,” he said. “Stay with the instruction. Trust that it knows what comes next.”

Maggie nodded, and when they began again, she did exactly as she was told.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities

by Judy Wells

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Judy Wells’ appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Her poems explore artists in France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Spain, from Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, and Balzac in Paris, to Velázquez and Goya in Madrid, and Gaudí in Barcelona.

Wells interweaves her own personal life into her poems, which illustrate her creative responses to her travels at different times—from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles—lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, haiku.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay
 
If the curators knew I, a moth, was in the Van Gogh room
they’d be shocked!
But what do they expect—
I love light and I’m particularly
attracted to a painting
of stars—globs of light
reflected in a river.
 
I’ve sat on top of these yellow blobs
and survived though I can feel
the heat of these stars
right through the paint.
Light bulbs are cold by comparison
though I’m not singed by Van Gogh.
I’m transformed and waves of ecstasy
wander through my wings.
 
I rest on Van Gogh’s stars all night.
In the morning I flit to a cottage
and settle on a deep blue iris.
The tourists think I’m part of the painting.
I laugh. I’m just a moth
with grand taste.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and www.regentpress.net

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