The mug was still on the table. That was the first thing she noticed: the coffee was still moving, the way liquid does after you set it down, still settling. She had not set it down. She was sitting in the chair she had been sitting in, and also not sitting in it, or sitting in it in a different way, the way you sit when you are looking at someone else in your chair.
Herself was looking at her.
She had expected, if she had expected anything, to be frightened. She was not frightened. She was something else, something she did not have a word for, which was the particular feeling of looking at something that is both familiar and too clear.
Herself said: sit down with me until.
Until what, Dael asked.
Herself did not answer. This seemed not like evasion but like a genuine answer to the question. Until whatever comes next. Until the coffee finishes settling. Until.
She sat.
She thought about the call she had been meaning to make to Soren. Not dramatically. She was not a person who dramatized her unmade calls. But practically: she had been meaning to make it for seven months and she had not, and now she was sitting at her own kitchen table after her own death with approximately thirty seconds, and the call existed in her memory the way undone things do, present and obvious and not reducible to explanation.
She did not know if thirty seconds was enough for what she wanted to say to herself. She did not know what she wanted to say. She looked at herself and thought: I know this face. I have been inside this face for fifty-eight years and I still do not entirely know it.
Herself said: I know about Soren.
I know you know, Dael said.
They sat until they didn't.