"And you're a furniture maker who believes wood can be honest."
"I believe wood doesn't lie about what it is. People do that enough for both of us."
She smiled, smaller this time, real. The dark pink liner around her lighter pink mouth made the smile look like a carefully kept secret deciding to step outside. "You're either going to be excellent company or deeply inconvenient."
"Possibly both," he said. "Fair warning."
They fell into the first silence of the journey—the kind that is not empty but listening. The wheels found their rhythm: a low, continuous argument with the rails. Somewhere down the corridor a cassette Walkman leaked a thin, private thread of music without words anyone could steal; a child asked loudly whether Santa took the train; a woman laughed into a paperback whose cover had been bent by too much love. The heating in the compartment clicked and sighed. Claire opened her gold handbag again and removed a Polaroid camera, small and slightly scuffed, the kind that made Christmas into rectangles you could hold while they were still warm from the machine's belly.
"Do you mind?" she asked. "I collect beginnings. Bad habit from work. And from being the sort of person who distrusts memory unless it's laminated."