"Only it's a little unfair, don't you think?" said Charlotte. "Julian never promised you anything."
There it was: the cruellest and the truest sentence of both my lives.
"No," I said. "He didn't."
Julian's eyes went from one of us to the other, suddenly surplus to a conversation about himself. Charlotte stepped closer.
"Sometimes girls mistake kindness for being in love."
"And sometimes girls mistake availability for attachment."
Her eyes narrowed. Julian spoke up quietly.
"Enough."
I laughed; I couldn't help it. They both turned.
"Sorry," I said. "It's just funny: you're the one setting boundaries in this conversation now."
And I left before either of them could turn it into a trial where my feelings would become evidence against me.
The deadline for appeals expired on Friday. The Eberwald scholarship office accepted portfolios only on paper: a sealed folder, the candidate's signature, the adviser's signature. In my first life it was I who put Julian's folder together: I bought the cream paper, printed two copies because he always smudged the ink, arranged the certificates in chronological order, wrote out question cards for the interview and tied the whole thing with dark blue ribbon. He used to say packaging was nonsense. And secretly he loved it when things were beautiful.
That Friday I handed in my own folder at eight oh five, the first, in a corridor still empty and smelling of the secretary's fresh coffee and printer's ink. By midday a queue of six had formed at the office, every folder identically immaculate: Eberwald had its own ideas about what the future looked like, and all of them fitted under dark blue ribbon.
Julian came at eight fifty-seven, three minutes before closing. His folder was creased, the ribbon crooked, a coffee stain spreading in the bottom corner. He looked at it with hatred, as at a traitor. Charlotte stood beside him with a brand-new leather case.
"Take mine," she whispered.
"No." Julian shook his head. "Let it be a mess. It's mine."
That surprised me – not enough to move me, but enough to remember.
Hartmann accepted both folders. His gaze rested on the coffee stain, then on me, then on Julian again.
"Thank you. Results on Monday."
The weekend stretched out strangely. For the first time in years I had not a single urgent matter connected with Julian: no desperate messages, no last-minute panic, no "just have a quick look, it won't take a minute". Time opened up like a field. At first I didn't know what to do with myself: freedom is unfamiliar when for years you have known only how to serve.
So on the Saturday I went to my mother at the flower shop, where she worked weekends for the extra money. In my first life I had hardly ever looked in: Saturdays were Julian's lessons. The shop smelled of wet stems and roses. Mum stood behind the counter trimming lilies; she had pinned her hair up in a hurry, and her apron was blotched with green. She looked younger than I remembered her and more tired than I would have liked.
"You're here?" she said, taken aback.
"I've come to help. You hate flowers."
"I hate carnations. There's a difference."
She laughed and pushed a bucket at me. For four hours I stripped leaves, wrapped bouquets and listened to the shop. The shop spoke in the voices of its customers: a man in an expensive coat took the largest bouquet and asked for a receipt "with no flowers in the wording"; a woman with a pushchair spent a long time choosing between three tulips and five and took three; an old man bought a single white rose, "as always," Mum said, and I did not ask who for. Mum tore into people who tried to replace an apology with flowers and then skimped on the bouquet.
"Remember this, my girl: a bouquet doesn't mend what words have broken," she said, cutting the ribbon. "But it helps you begin the conversation. Everything in life works that way: first the occasion, then the work."
At midday she poured me tea and looked at me over the rim of her cup.
"You've got lighter somehow."
"I've stopped carrying something."
"Was it heavy?"
"Very."
She asked nothing further. That was her gift: she knew when silence gives a person the chance to finish telling the truth later.
"About the doctor, by the way," I said between bouquets, as though it were the weather. "Thursday, perhaps?"
"Thursday I've got the christening orders," Mum said without lifting her head. "After the holidays, all right? That's enough, pass me the ribbon."
I passed her the ribbon. The word "after" I remembered.
On Monday morning there was cream paper under glass outside the scholarship office again. I saw the crowd from a distance, and from the way it parted I knew the decision had already been read.
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