Tangled Paths

Lena woke at 6:47, four minutes before her alarm, because her body had long ago decided that leaving anything to chance was for people with weaker constitutions. The ceiling above her bed was the color of skim milk, a shade she'd mixed herself after three failed attempts, and for a moment she simply lay there, staring at it, running through the pitch in her head like a rosary.

*Coastal but not beachy. Modern but not cold. Fresh, but—*

"Timeless," she said aloud, to the empty room. "Fresh, but timeless."

That was the word Brian from Solene Skincare had used four different times in their last meeting, each time with the same vague hand gesture, as if timelessness were a texture he could conjure from the air between them. She still didn't know what it meant. She suspected he didn't either.

She swung her legs out of bed and planted her feet on the small hexagonal rug she kept precisely there, because the floor was cold in October and because the rug's blue-gray pattern matched nothing else in the room, which bothered her more than she'd ever admit to Sophie. Everything else in the apartment had a place, a purpose, a color that spoke to the colors around it. The rug was the one…

Lena told herself, with the firm internal tone she usually reserved for talking herself out of a third espresso, that she was only stopping by for a drink. Nothing more. She had a legitimate reason to be in the neighborhood — a fabric store two streets over that stocked the specific weight of cotton she wanted for a packaging mockup, an errand entirely unrelated to bars without names or bartenders with unsettling powers of observation. It was simply convenient that the errand happened to route her past a narrow storefront wedged between a laundromat and a dead flower shop. Convenient, and nothing else.

She'd changed out of the gray blouse first. She noticed this only after she was already three blocks from home, already committed to the green sweater that Sophie had once called her "off-duty color," and told herself it meant nothing, that a person could simply prefer one sweater over another without it constituting evidence of anything.

The bar was busier than it had been the day before, though busier here seemed to mean six people instead of four, a low murmur instead of near silence, the same brass-and-bassline music turned up by some barely perceptible notch. Max was behind…

Sophie had been in Lisbon for exactly four days when she decided, with the particular confidence of someone who had never once successfully followed directions in her life, that she didn't need the map.

"I've got a good sense of direction," she told the hostel receptionist, a wiry man named Duarte who had already, twice, watched her leave the building and turn immediately the wrong way down the street. "It's a gift. Sort of like being double-jointed, but for cities."

"There is a viewpoint," Duarte said patiently, sliding a paper map across the desk anyway, as though he'd learned, through long and painful experience, that gifts of direction meant nothing against the tangled architecture of the Alfama district. "Miradouro da Graça. It is not hidden. It is on every map, every postcard, every—"

"Not that one," Sophie said, waving a hand. "I heard about a different one. A local told me. Some guy at the miradouro yesterday, said there's a smaller one, no tourists, you can only find it if you go up past the church with the blue tiles and then take a left where the street looks like it's ending but it isn't."

Duarte studied her the way you might study a puppy who had just informed you…