Clara: We are writing this together because we cannot agree on what happened and a single voice would be a lie.
René: She went first. That is the marriage.
Clara: The wall is gone. The café on Rua da Bica — demolished. Condominiums. The mark I left, my knuckles in the plaster, is under the foundations. My hand still carries the scar. I am carrying a demolished café in my right hand.
René: She loves dying things. I love dead things. The difference is timing.
Clara: The difference is —
René: — timing. The timing is the marriage.
Clara: He adjusts the telescope when the conversation becomes about us. The telescope is his doorway. He sits on the hill above Graça receiving light from dead things. I walk the streets below him receiving warmth from dying things. The hill between us is the —
René: — marriage. Her warmth from the cobblestones and my cold from the telescope meeting in the bed and exchanging and by morning neither of us knowing whose temperature is whose. That is the marriage. The exchange.
Clara: The hill.
René: The exchange.
I read Mariana's letter. The napkin. The numbered Wednesdays. The word she said to bookshelves and not to Viktor.
I called the observatory. I said come home. He said he was tracking something. I said come home.
He came home. He walked through the door with the cold still on him. I put my hands on his face. His jaw was cold from the hill. The weight of his head in my palms — the skull settling into the hands the way a stone settles into a palm. The cold passing from his jaw into my fingers. My warmth passing from my fingers into his jaw.
The hallway. The hallway is not in the book. The hallway is the truest room in the house.
We are still here. The same bed. The same hill. His hands are still cold from the telescope and my feet are still warm from the stones and the exchange still works and the exchange is the argument and the argument is the reaching and the reaching is the morning and the morning is the —
The reaching is the marriage. On this we agree. The sentence is hers. The sentence is mine. The sentence is ours. We can no longer tell. That is also the marriage.
— Clara & René
Lisbon. The hill between the observatory and the Alfama. The temperature is finding its balance.