He nodded. He was thirteen and change; nodding was the safest way to move through the world.
Ava studied the dirt where his heel had scored its little moon. She didn’t step closer. “Come away,” she said. “The festival is in a couple of days. We cannot invite whispers because a boy decided to gamble with fog.”
“It’s only fog,” he said, to see what would happen.
“It’s memory,” she replied. Then, after a pause she hadn’t planned: “And not always yours.”
He looked at her. The wind lifted the edges of her kerchief. He had heard her say a thousand practical things—how to keep his head lowered in prayer through the long hours; how to keep a man civil by not looking at him when he was trying to be looked at; how to tell real honey from boiled sugar. He had never heard her say this.
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head as if that might loosen an answer, then chose honesty instead. “I mean only that there are places where the world keeps what it has seen, and it does not always care whether the living are improved by it.”
He almost said, I don’t remember anything worth keeping. He did not say it, because it would have sounded like a complaint and because it wasn’t true. He remembered plenty: the bells of Saint‑Spire that rattled the Abbey rafters, the back‑of‑the‑throat ache of smoke from incense during long vigils, the way Ava’s wrists went red when she scalded them, and she pretended not to notice. He remembered a quiet gray cat that drifted through the cloister as if it had always known the way—appearing and disappearing as though it belonged to no one, yet somehow always finding him. He remembered a lullaby that belonged to no one. He remembered a name that he did not say out loud because it was not certain it belonged to him.