He almost didn't go.

At five-forty five on Friday evening, he was sitting in his office with his coat on and his bag packed and he found that he had not yet stood up, and that the gap between intending to go somewhere and actually going there had widened, in recent months, into a distance that occasionally required more effort to cross than it appeared.

He did stand up, though.

The common room was on the fourth floor, at the end of the corridor. It had been transformed for the occasion with the modest but sincere ambitions of a department that had a limited budget and Mrs. Antonova's organizational capabilities, which was to say there were paper chains, and the small tree with its accumulated ornaments, and a table along one wall bearing plates of food that people had brought from home and arranged with varying degrees of care, and in the centre of it all, a large glass bowl containing Mrs. Antonova's punch.

It was a deep, festive red and smelled powerfully of something that suggested Mrs. Antonova's definition of a departmental drinks event was slightly more robust than the university's official guidance on the matter.

About thirty people had gathered, which was most of the department plus a scattering of doctoral students who had been invited on the grounds that they also existed and deserved a mince pie.

The 'party' was still in its early stages, with overlapping conversations of people who were still warming up, the laughter coming in short burst as everyone found their register for the evening.

Roman stood in the doorway for a moment and took stock.

He had not been in a room with this many people since the funeral, which had featured considerably more people and considerably less punch and which he was choosing not to think about this evening.

This was both more manageable than he had anticipated and more affecting, in a way he hadn't expected, in a way that had nothing to do with grief exactly and everything to do with the dawning, slightly dazed recognition that the world was still going, that it had been going all along, that these people had been having their Fridays and their department drinks and their departmental jokes about Mrs. Antonova's punch for the entire seven months he had been sitting in the spare room in the dark.

And this was simply the nature of things, was it not? The indifferent, comforting continuation of everything.

Farida, who was definitely watching the door, appeared at his elbow with two cups of punch.

"You came," she said.

"You told me to," Roman said.

"I tell you a lot of things, Roman." Farida said. "You have a selective relationship with my advice." She handed him a cup. "Drink that carefully. Mrs. Antonova has been experimenting."

Roman drank it carefully. It tasted of cloves and citrus and something underneath that he couldn't identify. It was excellent.

"It's good," he said, with some surprise.

"It's always good," Farida said. "That's precisely the problem."

They stood together at the edge of the room and watched the party conduct itself. Roman's colleague Dr. Ashworth was holding court near the mince pies with a story that appeared to be building toward something, his hands describing large shapes in the air. Two of the doctoral students were having an argument about something. Mrs. Antonova moved through the room with satisfied authority, refilling cups and straightening the paper chains with the demeanor of a woman whose event was going exactly as she had planned, which it was, because Mrs. Antonova's events always went exactly as she planned.

Roman watched all of this and drank his punch and felt, without overstating it to himself, that he was glad he had come.

It was not a large feeling; like an expansive gladness of a man magically restored to himself and returned to the world with a new appreciation for its pleasures. God, no. It was way smaller than that; like the modest satisfaction of someone who had put on his coat and crossed the gap and arrived somewhere and found that the somewhere was bearable.

Samara would have loved it, he thought. She had always loved a departmental party. She had seemed to have a gift for them—for finding the person standing alone at the edge of the room and making them feel like standing alone at the edge of the room was exactly where she had been hoping to find them.

She had done it at every party Roman could remember, including, he realised, the first departmental Christmas drinks he had ever attended, about two decades ago, when he had been a new lecturer standing at the edge of a very similar room, holding a very similar cup, and a woman he had never met had appeared at his elbow and said to him that the punch tasted like a Victorian remedy and did he want to go find a better drink somewhere.

He had said yes, and they had gone. And that had been more or less that.

He stood in the spot where she would have found him. And he drank his punch and let the memory exist without trying to do anything with it.

Dr. Ashworth's story reached its conclusion. The doctoral students had resolved their argument, or abandoned it, or turned it into something else (it was hard to tell from across the room). Mrs. Antonova had found a new paper chain to straighten. The small tree with its mismatched ornaments stood in the corner and was, Roman thought, genuinely rather charming in its accumulated, undesigned way, each ornament a small piece of evidence that the department had been here for a long time and intended to continue.

Farida refilled his cup without asking.

"Thank you," Roman said, meaning the punch and also the other things, like the coffee that day and the invitation and the eleven days and the you don't have to decide anything about it now. She just nodded at him without a word.

He stayed for two hours, which was longer than he had planned and shorter than the evening warranted. He also talked to people—to Ashworth about a paper, to one of the doctoral students about her methodology, to Mrs. Antonova briefly about the punch, which she revealed with quiet pride contained a measure of something she had brought back from a trip to Tallinn in 2019 and had been saving for a special occasion—and it was not effortless, any of it, the way it had once been effortless, the way an evening like this had once cost him nothing because Samara had always been somewhere in the room, a fixed point he could orient himself around without even realising he was doing it.

But it was not impossible either.

He said his goodnights. Farida walked him to the door of the common room and stood with him for a moment in the corridor, where the radiator knocked with its punctual insistence.

"Same time next year," she said.

"God willing," Roman said, which was not a thing he had ever said before in his life, and which made Farida smile, and which he found, walking down the corridor toward the stairwell, that he had meant.

He drove home through the decorated streets, through the gold lights in the sycamores and the illuminated reindeer on the off-licence roof, which he looked at this time without flinching, and pulled into the driveway.

Eight days.

He got out of the car and went inside and hung his coat on the hook and went to bed, and if he lay in the dark for a while thinking about a woman at a departmental party thirty years ago who had appeared at the elbow of a man standing alone and changed the entire subsequent course of his life, well.

That was between him and the dark.

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