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Relief had given way to guilt.

Guilt was not an emotion that Elaine considered herself to be on close terms with. She was, in fact, refreshingly free of self-reproach in most respects. But there was that whole damned honor thing, now - that integrity she was supposed to be upholding. Earth Knight bullshit. Disgusting.

Disgusting, but, unfortunately, compelling. It felt a bit like Gouvernail had become a sort of French Jiminy Cricket, sitting on her shoulder and dispensing inward sensations of disapproval - male disapproval being a thing she usually courted with energy but somewhat quailed before, inconveniently, when it related to the specific vagaries of conducting herself with honor under the name that had once been his. It did, somehow, feel a bit like scratching up a family heirloom. She hadn't asked to hold it, but he hadn't been the one that handed it to her, either.

She still had not entirely arrived at a decision when she arrived at Myth’s shop on a sleepy weekend. She carried a tote bag on one arm, laden with the things she'd promised to come back and share, and in the other she cradled a small, shaky dog, wrapped up in a tiny yellow raincoat and broadcasting both anxiety and despair, in the way that small shaky dogs tend to do. As she pushed open the door, the forlorn creature turned large watery eyes towards Myth, as if pre-emptively begging for mercy and a speedy death rather than whatever torture awaited within, while Elaine sang out a greeting more cheerfully than she felt.

“I hope you're not too busy to chat for a bit. I've done some digging.”

Elaine laughed at this abundance of concern, obligingly settling the dog down next to the proffered saucer. It gazed at it with an apprehensiveness that suggested it suspected poison, but then politely gave it exactly two licks, as if terrified that to be rude might call down sudden violence. It then turned back to Elaine and rose on its hindlegs to be scooped up again, which it accordingly was.

“Her name is Petitcru,” she said, while this little scene played out. “And you're very kind, but she prefers to be carried when we're out and about. She gets all her energy out at home. Thank you for not minding me bringing her in - I try not to when I go antiquing, but I've been so busy lately I feel like I need to spend more time with her.” She settled the dog in the crook of her arm, instructing it: “Say hello.” Petitcru obediently raised one paw as if to wave, accompanied by a violent tremble, as Elaine took a seat.

“To be honest, I love big dogs too - I'm actually more of a cat person, but anyway - Petitcru sort of fell into my lap. And my family only ever had little yap-dogs, so I'm used to them, at least.” She gave a helpless little shrug, pulling a little folder out of the tote bag and beginning to array the contents of it before them. She moved as if fully accustomed to being forced into doing things one-handed, from having the other occupied by a little dog. “I found more than I expected. Do you wanna hear about Louisa and Hank?” She pointed to a print out of an old photo - not in the album - of a somewhat homely woman and her even more homely husband standing before a flowering bush, the two of them smiling so radiantly that Elaine seemed compelled to beam back at them.

“I don't think so,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But I'm not really much of a romantic myself, so I may be a bad judge. But if you do, it'll be good tears.”

And she embarked on an explanation of all she'd found, with the simple enthusiasm of someone who recognized that she was speaking to someone else who found an interest in the banality of stranger's lives, as lived some time before their own. In most ways it was not remarkable: the children of very poor parents. Google Maps street views of tiny little old houses where childhoods had passed. A wedding - with photos from the album brought into their proper context - and a marriage. A single child, raised on the brink of poverty in a tiny house, whose name was now proudly printed on a plaque on the front of an architectural firm. Another house: modest but comfortable, in the architect's name, where there were two rocking chairs on the front porch at some point, and where the same flowering shrub blossomed out front - the scion, it was to be assumed, nurtured from a cutting of the one that had grown before their first house together. And finally, two obituaries, four months apart: ripe old lives, reflected on with pleasure, and the memories posted in a funeral home’s online guestbook alongside all the printed out photos of two happy, homely people growing old together. A totally mundane life, of no note whatsoever.

The best kind.

“I emailed him,” she said, indicating the architect’s headshot. “To ask if he wanted it. He asked for a few things and some copies of some other things, and told me to keep the rest. He has no idea how they ended up in your hands. Mixed in with an uncle's stuff, is his best guess. But they live with me now. The locket, too.”

She paused, and then smiled even more broadly, as if she was about to do a very impressive magic trick. “I asked him for a favor. He mailed me this, and I've been drying it for you - that's part of what took so long.” And she procured a little ruffled pink blossom, holding it out towards Myth. “From the ones in their yard. Caught him just in time for it to be in bloom.”

“I'm not much of a beer person,” she said. “But I wouldn't say no to a glass of water.”

Even if she was not herself moved, she didn't seem to judge Myth for it, absently stroking one of Petitcru’s ears as the dog transferred into her only state of existence that was not quiet terror - drowsiness. She was silent for a moment, letting Myth go about her business before she lifted her voice to carry back to her host.

“I get it, though. It's always sort of - I don't know - like it's weird and cool to think of people living their lives and they're all important. And sometimes they run up against yours, and you learn a little thing and it just reminds you that every person you say hi to on the sidewalk in a day has all their melodramas even if they live the most banal life imaginable.”

Her eyes were resting on some of the various antiques as she spoke, and as always she found herself imagining the hands they had passed through, the eyes they had delighted. “It feels - important, I guess, to remember it sometimes.” She could not quite keep the troubled edge from her voice. She knew how the words would strike someone in their secretly-shared situation - the value of a mundane life when so much of what they did wasn't mundane at all. A little starseed held in her fingers, before being plunged gently back into a frail little chest. And Myth - she did not know her other name - had called herself a psychopomp.

The word lingered unspoken in her mouth as she looked around at all the accumulated evidence of a thousand lives, ferried over to the great beyond, leaving behind something to be remembered by, even in the abstract. Myth was a bit of a psychopomp in her daytime life, as well.

I'm going to tell her, she realized numbly. It felt, somehow, that she had to.

“Nah. It's just a lot to think about. Heavy, you know?”

She said it lightly, and almost immediately felt the wretchedness she always felt when she told a little white lie. She concealed her momentary uncertainty in taking a drink, and then, putting the glass down, kissed the dog’s forehead as if it were Petitcru that needed an injection of courage and not herself.

Well. Nothing for it.

Her hand moved slowly over the scattered notes, bringing them back into something like order as she spoke, for the sake of having something to do.

“I'm awfully busy. It took me a while to get back here - not just because of the flower - just because every day I seem to have a lot going on. I feel like I barely even get time to text my own family. And that sucks, because I've been meaning to come by and talk to you.”

For a moment, this sounded like the lead up to some sort of gentle rejection. She had, after all, met Myth at a singles mixer and had just brought her a very sentimental flower. But the truth was simply that Elaine didn't think in those terms, or at least rejected the idea of other people doing so when they occurred. It was not the softest or kindest part of her character, that when she filled in “casual fun” on a dating app she considered it to be the other party's problem if feelings were caught, or if too much meaning was ascribed to her own actions.

Instead, of course, it veered off in a radically different direction, Elaine's eyes still fixed absently on the table.

“I guess - I guess I did have a run-in the other night, but it was no big deal. My conscience reproaches me,” she said, with a tight smile. “I feel like I let you down. I saw someone - well, I thought they were looting this shop. They claimed to have your permission. I should have - done more in that conversation, to be sure I was doing the right thing.”

The hand wrapped around Petitcru’s chest had a ring on it - unremarkable in its civilian glamour save for looking too heavy and too masculine compared to any other jewelry she wore, as if she was a cheerleader wearing her boyfriend's class ring. Unthinkingly, she twisted it around her finger as she finished. “Maybe I didn't act with as much honor as I could have.”

"White," she said promptly. "I'm wearing pastels and I don't trust my hands right now."

Which wasn't to say she had exactly achieved Petitcru levels of trembling, but maybe she was feeling less steady than she looked.

"When I say I didn't act with honor I meant - leaving you like that. At a disadvantage. Knowing something you didn't. It's been preying on me, I guess. That I knew who you were and you didn't know who I was. It was - cowardly? Yeah. It felt cowardly. Urgh," she said, wrinkling her nose and closing her eyes. "God, I hate when he's right." She didn't clarify that comment, which was apparently made only as a vent to her own feelings. "Even if it was a slip-up on your part. I don't know. I've never told anyone. I wasn't sure what to do. But as for the other name -"

She hesitated. "Do we have to? Isn't it enough to know it in general terms?" And then, bluntly: "I don't know the protocol here."

Elaine, ever quick to pick up on the little unspoken parts of a conversation, certainly knew the look of someone gazing with sadness at the bottom of an empty glass. She rose, abandoning her own mug to bring the bottle and give Myth a top-off where she was standing. This, somehow, seemed to steady her nerves, as if she was the one who'd shotgunned a mug of white wine, although she had had only one sip of her own. Perhaps she was one of those people who derived steadiness from being in control of a situation, even if it was one as small as filling a glass - temporarily abandoning the role of a guest and assuming the role of a host seemed to snap her back to herself, in some way.

"I can't get too drunk. I have to walk home," she said, hoisting the dog demonstratively. But she paused, uncertain.

"You should have told me that before telling me the protocol wasn't set in stone," she said wryly. "I could just leave now and call that winging it."

But she didn't, settling the bottle down nearer Myth - lest she drop and break that - and returning to her own cup, although she didn't sit down. She eyed her over the lip of her drink as she took a more substantial gulp.

"Joyeuse Garde," she said, at last. "But to be honest, I hate calling myself that. And it's also very French. So Joy is fine." And then: "We're even now. So don't go volunteering a bunch more, because I don't plan on following suit."

She juggled the mug into her dog-holding hand to return the handshake - and as it had been at the singles mixed it was firm, businesslike, almost remarkably professional given the circumstances.

She laughed at the offer, but no sooner had the sound escaped her then she paused, as if a thought occurred.

"Do you have something with seagulls on it?" she suddenly blurted, and she looked distressed as soon as she said it, flushing with a second laugh and downing the rest of her wine. "I'll pay. Since we're already even."