Selin's son had been in her kitchen for three weeks, and in that time she had come to believe that the hardest part of knowing something was having no place to put it.
Emre was thirty-eight. He had come home after his marriage ended and taken the small bedroom back the way a man returns to a country he had hoped to need only once. He was not unkind. He was precise. He had spent a decade watching the world carefully and arrived at conclusions that were, as far as she could tell, accurate. People were mostly self-interested. Generosity was usually management of something: guilt, image, loneliness. Even love was transactional at depth.
He made these arguments quietly, without heat, over toast and over dinner and once during a walk by the water when the light was good. He was not trying to convince her. He had simply arrived somewhere and was reporting from it.
She could not dispute the evidence. She had different evidence she could not bring.
Twenty-eight years ago she had received a document. She had been, in her late thirties, a conservator at a municipal archive, and a colleague had left it on her desk with a note that said only: you should have this. The colleague resigned the following week. She had not been able to reach him after that. The document was handwritten, in several hands across several centuries, and it recorded, in plain and exact language, acts of human kindness. Hundreds of them. No conclusions drawn. No pattern named. Just the acts, the dates, the small facts around them.
The final page, in handwriting she did not recognize, said: Do not show this to anyone. Give it to the right person when you know.
She had been waiting twenty-eight years to know.
She looked at her son, who was eating toast and explaining the neighborhood watch.
She looked at his hands. They were her father's hands, she had always thought. The same square shape, the same way of holding things.
Last Tuesday she had woken at four in the morning and come downstairs and found him at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen. He was writing something. She had stood in the doorway in the dark and watched him fold it and slide it under her coffee cup before he went back to bed. In the morning the note said: I saw a good movie last night. Will tell you about it.
That was all.
She had sat with the note for a long time.
Now she looked at him across the table.
"There's something I want to show you," she said.
He looked up.
She held it for a moment. She thought about the document in its envelope in the drawer in the bedroom. She thought about her colleague, wherever he was, and the person who had given it to him, and the person before that, each of them carrying it forward through whatever years they had, deciding.
"Never mind," she said. "Later."
He nodded and looked back at his toast.
She picked up her cup and found, underneath it, last Tuesday's note.