Chapter One
Names on a Box
The box bearing her former husband's name contained a room Merryn had invented while he was asleep.
She remembered the night quite clearly. A borrowed table, a cold cup, Corin's coat over the back of her chair. She had painted until the rain outside turned into the rain inside the picture. In the morning he had looked over her shoulder and said that she had made bad weather seem worth staying in for.
It had been a good thing to say. She had kept it much longer than the coat.
Now a fresh label announced that the rainy room was a fine example of Corin Vennor's early designs. Merryn read it twice, in case the second reading might improve it.
"Are you finding what you came for?" the young man asked.
"With remarkable accuracy."
He was holding a clipboard against a cream sweater that had encountered several colours of paint. Round spectacles enlarged his worried eyes. Behind him the scenery store rose in narrow aisles, full of doors whose houses had been dismantled and staircases that stopped before the landing.
"Ren," he said. "Petra said to let you have the window. We put the pieces together."
"That was kind. I'm Merryn."
"I know. I mean, she told me. We haven't met."
He looked at the label in her hand and went pink. She wished she had not made him the person who had to stand beside it.
