"Good," she says, and the word is the size of a suture. She reaches for the grey, winter-thread where it lies in a gentle hitch around the wardrobe handle and draws a span of it loose. It floats across her palm like ash taught to obey. She winds it between index and middle finger, a single figure-eight, then across the knuckle of her ring finger—three turns, no knots. The first wrap belongs to her grandmother; the second is her own; the third is for the room to understand what conversation means.
"I'm working," she tells the mirror, not as apology. As declaration.
"Proceed," Luca says, letting the desk rest between notes, polite as a waiting accompanist.
Mira pulls the thread gently; it does not bite, but it remembers the idea. The silver behind the glass answers with a low ripple under the fog, tense as water in a full glass carried across carpet. The warmed rectangle she wrote last night holds; the condensation presses up to it and does not cross.
"Positions," she says. "At midnight. Give me a map, not a poem."
"The piano stood here," he answers, and the central pane draws a fine graphite rectangle over its own face, the lid like a black lake seen from above. "Bar there." A line appears, faint as breath. "Dumbwaiter hatch—back left, just out of sight unless you were staff or me."
"And you."
"In the bevel near the door," he says, with no ornament. "Where men go to fix ties and promises."
"Who stood between you and her."
"A cluster of almosts," he says, with a smile that hates itself. Then he obeys the shape she asked for. "Arthur at the keyboard. Two women who always dressed like they were going to the wrong party. A man with a chin that looked borrowed. And the bartender with the soft hands that make people forget to be careful."
"Soft hands," she repeats. "Describe them."
"The sort that know napkins from linen by blind touch," he says. "The sort that never quite close around a glass, as if a closing hand is an act of violence."
She twitches the grey thread once. The ripple under the silver sharpens, then flattens—truth finding its pitch.
"Who poured her last drink."
He doesn't answer at once. In the left-hand bevel, his outline leans forward as if to volunteer a name. In the right-hand bevel, his outline leans back as if savoring the power of silence. The central pane keeps its discipline: the not-quite-mouth, the fog, the ward.
"Don't admire the gap," she says. "Fill it."
"The soft hands," he says. "Or the man with the borrowed chin. I couldn't see the mouth of the bottle. I saw glass kiss wood. I heard liquid learn to believe in itself." He stops, as if the room has applied pressure to his throat in sympathy with the candle's tiny wind. "If I tell you I'm certain, I'll be lying. I'm not."
"Better," she says, and draws the thread between her fingers so it thrumms a truth too high for a person and perfect for a mirror. The silver ripples once, twice; the bevels catch the motion and break it into small shining fish that run the frame and vanish.
"Names," she says. "Of the soft hands."
"I won't give you one," he says lightly, and his lightness is a flare that makes his own face squint at itself. "Not because I'm protecting anyone. Because that name is not the hinge. It's a screw. We'll tighten it later."
"Then give me the hinge," she says.
"Midnight," he says. "And a promise spoken to the room like a toast."
"Who heard it," she asks, though she can hear last night's answer breathing around her.
"Everyone," he says, and does not enjoy saying it this time.
She twists the thread once more around her finger; the figure-eight becomes a clover. It doesn't tighten. It asks questions. The air acknowledges. Heat gathers along the skin of her throat—not sweat; pressure. The beeswax flame leans sideways toward the wardrobe as if something just off the pane is practicing breath.
"Angles," she says. "When the glass returned upright—was the mouth of the bottle over it or beside it. Don't say probably. Say what you saw."
"Beside," he says. No hesitation. The ripple under the silver goes quiet for a heartbeat—the mirror's version of nodding. "It would have been an ugly pour if it had been above."
"Ugly how."
"Arm too far," he says. "Elbow at the wrong height. The napkin would have been asked to work, and the napkin was not called upon."
She lets the smallest approval move through her chest. "Did you—direct anyone," she asks. "Did you set a lamp an inch."
He doesn't hide it. "Yes."
"Which."
"Bar-lip lamp," he says. "I asked it to forgive someone's profile." A beat. "Hers."
"Why."
"Because she was tired," he says, and the left-hand bevel's profile steps a hair closer to contrition. "And I wanted the room to be kind."
"And the right-hand lamp," she asks.
"I left it alone," he says. The right-hand bevel's profile smiles, fox-quick. "Because I wanted the room to be interesting."
"Two intentions," she says. "Two faces."
At that, the mirror obliges her. In the fog, his outline splits—not double, not trick glass; the central pane holds him, but the bevels take charge: left profile a sober ink line, the ear and jaw clean, the mouth offered without teeth; right profile a sketch with its own weather, the corner of the mouth sharpened, the gaze canted, a man who knows he is someone's mistake and chooses excellent posture.
"You're doing that," he says, half-pleased, half-unnerved.
"The thread is," she says. "It shows the hand that wants to steady and the hand that wants to stir."
"Both are hands," he murmurs. The right-hand profile speaks first: "I wanted her to be looked at." The left-hand profile follows: "I wanted her not to feel alone."
"Which is the lie," Mira asks. "Pick one. Spare me a speech."
The right-hand smile holds beautifully and says nothing. The left-hand mouth tries and fails; it shakes its head—a movement the central pane translates into fog that thickens at the lower edge and lifts at the upper, like a breath bravely taken.
"Don't choose," she says. "We'll be here all morning. Tell me instead: did she look at you in the bevel."
"Yes," he says. "The way people look at mirrors that keep secrets." He sounds angry with himself for saying it that way and angrier with the pleasure that returns to him anyway. "She adjusted nothing. She wanted to see if she would be forgiven without work."
"And were you forgiving," she says.
"Too much," the left-hand profile says.
"Not enough," the right-hand profile counters, wry.
"Which is true," she says.
"I don't know," they say together, then catch themselves, then speak in unison again as if the glass has refused to let them separate: "Both."
She slides the grey thread free of her ring finger and loops it through the web of her thumb instead, a small, careful reconfiguration. The ripple in the silver changes voice—the water under the glass becomes silk under the glass. The candle gutters. Sideways. No draft comes under the door; the window latch is set precisely where she left it; still, the flame bows toward the pane as if a lung on the wrong side of the mirror has exhaled with bad manners. Heat climbs along the column of her throat like a hand that learned to ask at last and decided not to.
"Again," she says evenly, because steady questions lower the room's pulse when nothing else does. "Her name."
He stands very still inside the fog; even the right-hand profile stops its appetite. The desk, obedient, offers no note. The radiator gives a single patient tap for courage and goes silent on purpose.
"Plainly," Mira says, with no particular mercy.
"I won't give it to you," he says softly, not coy. "Not full. Say that's cowardice if you like. I will give you the first syllable if syllables did not hurt."
"Initial," she says. The word has no sweetness in it. It breathes like a tool.
"A," he says.
It sits between them for a heartbeat and explains more than it should—A for the woman in the blue-black dress with the dotted net; A for the baton of rolled music forgotten under the chair; A for the name people say first when they promise themselves they won't say anyone's name.
Mira slips the thread back across her knuckles, as if a card has been turned over and she does not intend to pretend she didn't see it. "Arthur," she says, to test the obvious lie.
"No," the left-hand profile says.
"Not unless he liked pearls and pretending," the right-hand profile adds, amused despite itself.
"All right," she says. "A. Did A pour for herself at any point that night."
"Yes," he says. "Earlier. She liked the theater of touching the bottle and no one stopping her. She was good at doing a bad thing in a way that made it look like a trick and not an error."
"Who asked her to promise midnight."
"She volunteered," he says. "Arthur would never ask. He trafficked in requests disguised as boredom."
"Who was nearest when she laughed at the bar at twelve-oh-one."
"The bartender," he says. "And the woman who wore a smile like a hinge. She knew all the doors in the room and loved each one equally. She had lipstick that never failed a glass."
"Colors," Mira says.
"Red," he says, offended at having to answer, then calms. "But not blue-red. Not stage. Cherry-pit red. She left a small country on a napkin when Madame folded it, and the coast looked like a tide line."
"Did A talk to her."
"Yes," he says, and the right-hand profile takes over. "A spoke to everyone she wasn't waiting for; it made her feel like the person she thought she was supposed to be."
"Did A accept something from anyone's hand besides the glass."
"The watch," he says, and the left-hand profile lifts its blank palm as if to exhibit the bruise. "Borrowed as a joke from the man with the borrowed chin. He had a mouth that liked hearing itself even when silent. She put the watch on her left wrist and hated the weight and kept it anyway."
"Did the man with the chin leave before or after midnight."
"After," he says, and the ripple argues with itself in the silver as if trying to disagree and not finding grounds. "He is not my villain. He is my bore."
"You keep trying to give me villains," she says.
"I keep trying to give you theater," he corrects. "You asked for housekeeping."
"Good," she says. "Whose hand touched the glass last."
"The one with soft hands," he says, and the flame bows again, sideways, as if the word soft has lungs. "But touch is not guilt. Touch is simply the last thing that happens to a surface before the world blames it."
"Did A taste anything wrong before the wrong thing mattered," she asks. "Tell me if she flinched."
He is quiet for a beat too long and then says, "She smiled in her eyes and not in her mouth. That is a flinch."
"And you," she says. "What did you do in the second after midnight when she didn't come."
"I made the room smaller," he says. The left-hand profile winces. "I thought it would be kind."
"And was it."
"No," he says.
She takes the thread off her hand altogether, lays it flat across her palm, and breathes on it once—no fog, only the heat that lives in a person who has worked nights. She crosses to the wardrobe and touches the hitch of grey where it loops the handle—no tightening, just call and response. The ripple under the silver calms. The pressure in the room does the opposite.
It's not menace. It is the gathering you feel just before a choir you didn't know was in the building chooses the same note by accident and then, hearing itself, chooses it on purpose. The candle gutters again—sideways, obedient to no draft, only to weight—and rights itself, embarrassed. Heat climbs her throat, licks the hinge of her jaw, presses politely at the place the dotted net in the dream had covered. She keeps her shoulders quiet. She refuses to name it beyond what it is: pressure learning manners.
"The initial stays," she says, to keep the conversation in the corridor she built and not fiction's box. "A. Did A know you existed."
"Yes." The right-hand profile smiles, too pleased. The left-hand profile adds, "She didn't ask for favors."
"Did she despise you," Mira asks. "Some people do that with mirrors."
"No," he says. "She flirted with me as if we were cousins forced to sit beside one another at a long table."
"Family," Mira repeats, and the thread in her palm hums once along the line of bone. "Then we will treat her with manners." She looks at the central pane. "Was the poisoned glass intended for her."
"I think so," he says.
"By whom."
He opens his mouth—both profiles ready, one about to be tender, the other about to be clever—and something in the room presses hard enough at the warmed border of her ward that every prism in the chandelier kisses its neighbor at once without making a sound. The flame leans left, then right, indecisive, then finds center. The window does not stir. The salt on the sill shifts one grain, not enough to break the line.
"Answer," Mira says, level. "Plainly."
"The person who loves housekeeping," he says at last, and it is not a riddle. It is as close as the thread permits to a name without making him a liar. "The person whose job is to make rooms so clean you think they were never used."
"Not Madame," Mira says—statement, not question.
"No," he says. "Not then. Not—and this is important—a woman. A man, tired of tidying up after A's messes with a smile and wanting to tidy something else for once."
"You stoked him," she says.
"I didn't need to," he says. "He came pre-heated."
In the glass, the two profiles flicker and then, for a brief, unnerving second, overlap—tenderness mouth aligned with slyness mouth, one confession laid over a smirk—then pull apart again as the ripple sighs. The pressure in the room climbs one more notch, and the heat that has been climbing her throat parks itself neatly under her tongue, a little brand that is not pain and not comfort.
"Enough," she says to the room, not to him, and keys in the word she has used at operating tables and alleyways, the one that means stop without punishing anyone who does. The pressure holds. It does not retreat. That is its version of obedience.
"Term?" Luca offers, quiet, and the fact that he offers now and not when there is applause to be bought makes the offer more expensive.
"Term," she says, and lifts the grey thread once more. It shines dull in the candlelight like a river under cloud. She loops it, not around her wrist, not around the handle—just across the air in front of the pane, a small, unclosed circle. The ripple under the silver draws itself into the same shape inside, as if mirroring is the only language anyone has left.
He sees it. He understands what it is—a mouth without teeth; a question. "I won't push," he says first, as if paying an old bill. Then, because his divided reflection has taught him what happens when you negotiate in halves: "And if the room brings heat to your throat, I won't call it mine."
"Good," she says, and does not thank him; that is not the currency they are using. "Now—A."
"A," he says again, and somewhere under the desk the wood hums the three notes he played last night, unbidden. The candle gutters sideways once more, a bow in miniature, and steadies. The heat climbs to the notch at her pulse and pauses there like breath before a word.