My phone had stopped buzzing.
I looked down at it. The screen was still lit, still showing the endless cascade of matches, but for the first time since last night, it wassilent. No vibrations. No notifications. No insistent, relentless demand.
Just… quiet.
I stared at the phone. Stared at the man. Back at the phone.
“What did you do?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t do anything.”
“My phone stopped.”
“Congratulations. Is that unusual?”
“You have no idea.” I held it up, showing him the screen full of faces like it was evidence of a crime. “It’s been doing this for sixteen hours straight. It hasn’t stopped once. Not when I threw it across the room, not when I tried to drown it in the sink, notwhen I put it in the freezer. And now I walk in here and it just… stops?”
He looked at the phone. Looked at me. His expression didn’t change, exactly, but something shifted behind his eyes—curiosity, maybe, buried under layers of deliberate disinterest.
“That does sound like a problem.”
“It’s a NIGHTMARE. There are men wandering around downtown right now who think disco is still relevant. One of them tried to pay for coffee with a Susan B. Anthony dollar.”
The unplugged radio crackled again. This time I was sure it was laughing.
“Your radio’s broken,” I said.
“It’s not broken. It’s just opinionated.” He said this like it was perfectly normal. Like vintage radios having opinions was just part of running an antique shop.
Maybe it was. What did I know about antiques?
“I’m sorry for barging in,” I said, and meant it. “I just—I needed somewhere to hide. There’s a man outside in a leisure suit who keeps calling me ‘foxy mama’ and I think I’m having some kind of breakdown.”
He studied me for a long moment—this disheveled woman in yesterday’s clothes who had burst into his closed shop babbling about possessed phones and disco enthusiasts.
Then he sighed.
“Tea’s in the back,” he said, turning away from the counter. “You look like you need it.”
The back room was small,cramped, and inexplicably comforting.
A worn leather armchair that had probably been expensive in 1972 sat next to a window overlooking a tiny courtyard. A hotplate with a kettle. Shelves crammed with books and boxes and objects I couldn’t identify—a jar of old keys, a collection of glass eyes (unsettling), a porcelain hand that I chose not to look at too closely.
The walls were covered in photographs. Old ones, in silver frames tarnished with age. A woman with dark hair and a bright smile, caught mid-laugh on what looked like a pier. The same woman on a beach, shielding her eyes from the sun. The same woman in what looked like this very room, surrounded by boxes, grinning at the camera like she owned the world.
In every photo, she was radiant. The kind of person who made rooms brighter just by being in them.
I didn’t ask. Some things you don’t need to ask about.
He made tea without asking how I took it. Two sugars. Splash of milk. Exactly right.
“How did you know?” I asked, accepting the cup.
“Know what?”
“How I take my tea.”
He shrugged, settling into a wooden chair across from me. “Lucky guess.”
