Samuel turned his cup slowly in his hands. The paper grew warmer, then almost too warm. "I'm supposed to look at a job in Chicago after New Year's. A shop that's expanding. More money. Benefits. A title that would make my mother able to say 'my son the' something with a noun attached. Less of the work I care about. More management, less making. Spreadsheets instead of grain." He met her eyes. In the snack car's harsher light her platinum hair looked almost silver, her makeup a little more theatrical, her beauty a little more like a decision. "My mother wants me to take it. Says Dad would have wanted security. I'm not sure Dad and security were ever on speaking terms. He once turned down a contract to build cabinets for a chain because they wanted particleboard cores with a walnut veneer. Said he wouldn't spend his life teaching wood how to pretend."
"So we're both on a train toward other people's ideas of our lives," Claire said.
"Seems that way."
"How inconvenient," she murmured, and the word was soft enough to be a confession, "to meet someone who makes the ideas look smaller. Smaller and—worse—optional."
The words landed gently. Neither of them picked them up at once. They finished the chocolate. A child ran past, pursued by a mother with a candy-cane apology. They walked back through the corridor, and in compartment 4B the air felt changed, charged, as if the wood itself had been listening and had decided to keep their secrets in its grain.
Night deepened the way winter nights do—suddenly, thoroughly, with a completeness that made the compartment bulb feel like a campfire. Claire kicked off her white heels—she had been wearing them with the kind of defiance that ignored ice and platform gaps—and tucked her feet beneath her on the seat. The white pants wrinkled at the knees in a way that somehow made her more human, less display. Samuel offered his cream sweater when she shivered; she refused the sweater but accepted the gesture, which somehow mattered more than wool. He draped his camel overcoat around her shoulders instead, and she let it stay, swimming in the camel color against all that white, a temporary truce between their palettes.