By her sixth visit to Knight Shift, Marnie had begun to wonder when the manager slept.
She had seen him at noon, at a quarter to midnight, and at six in the morning, always in the same black apron. A white knight's helmet occupied its front, with red, green, and blue outlines showing where the three helmets didn't quite meet. He had dark curls cut close at the sides, a long nose, and the useful ability to remember a tea order without making its owner feel obliged to improve it.
Other customers seemed used to him. A man in a bakery fleece collected a coffee and said, "Still here?"
"For my sins."
"See you tomorrow."
"I'll pencil you in."
Outside, the sign said BOOKS, COFFEE, 24 HOURS. Online, the shop was rgbknights. Its little helmet leaned over recommendations posted at hours when even Marnie wasn't working. She had found the place through a review that called a six-hundred-page fantasy novel "a hostage situation with a map." She had bought the novel anyway.
This morning she had brought a different book back to complain about.
"Two pages," she said. "Her mother asks whether she's staying, and it takes her two pages to say, 'For tea.'"
The manager was shaking powdered sugar over a tray of rolls. A strip of tape covered the edge of his left thumbnail. "That sounds like an answer."
"It's a dodge."
"You can dodge with an answer."
Marnie opened A Room in February to the scene. Vera had been home for less than an hour. Her mother had already measured her against the doorframe, remarked on her hair, and moved her suitcase from beside the chair to beside the stairs. Then came the question. Then the maddening tour of the room: a chipped bowl, a lamp, the wool of her mother's coat sleeve. Marnie liked the book so much that she resented this bit of it.
"She knows what she means," Marnie said. "Everyone has to stand there while she enjoys not saying it."
"Her mother doesn't get to decide how long it takes her to answer."
He said it while wiping sugar off the counter, which made it harder to dismiss as a line he had prepared for people who read novels too seriously.
Marnie made subtitles. She spent her working days persuading what people had actually said to fit the space available for it. Lately she had been working on a film in which a woman kept beginning sentences and abandoning them. Her editor kept asking whether something was missing.
"Two pages, though."
"You're in a bookshop. I'm obliged to defend pages."
"Even wasted ones?"
"Especially. Terrible business otherwise."
She laughed. He put a roll beside her tea, then took a book out from under the till. It was the shop's copy of A Room in February, with a split in the blue paper jacket and a receipt marking Vera's homecoming.
"I'll have another look," he said.
Marnie sat down at the small table behind the travel shelves, meaning to drink her tea and go home. She stayed to fix one subtitle, then another. At half past three the manager put a fresh pot beside her laptop without disturbing the book she had weighted open with her glasses case.
"You can charge it to my next visit," she said.
"That could be any minute."
His watch had a red strap. He looked at it, glanced towards the back door, and went to fetch more milk.
A few minutes later the oven timer sounded. He came out carrying another tray, lowered it beside the till, and pulled a roll apart to check the middle. He used his left hand to turn the tray. His thumbnail looked clean.
Marnie glanced at her screen. She had been staring into a close-up for forty minutes; it was possible that she was getting the wrong things into focus.
The manager set down the roll and picked up the shop's book.
"I think her mother spends most of it telling people what Vera means," he said. "What she meant to say. What she really wants. Maybe the silence is the first thing her mother hasn't already said for her."
Marnie took her hands off the keyboard.
"That's quite good."
"Sorry."
"You've been thinking about it."
"A bit."
He was holding a green pencil. A small green question mark had appeared beside the passage. Marnie reread it, this time without hurrying Vera towards her next line.
When she went home, she watched the unfinished sentences in her film again. She put back one little beginning she had cut. The editor asked about it; Marnie answered him, and for once she didn't rewrite the answer four times before sending it.
She told Knight about that on her next visit. She had never properly asked his name. A regular called him Knight, his own messages were signed with the helmet, and eventually that was what she called him too.
"The book's winning," he said.
"The book isn't a person."
"Then you're in real trouble."
He remembered her tea, found a book she'd asked him to hold, and correctly warned her away from a lemon slice that looked much nicer than it was. He was tired enough to put his own cup on a saucer full of used teaspoons. The cup was blue, with a chip out of the base.
Marnie liked him better for the teaspoons.
Over the next week, she began to notice things she had previously let pass.
He wrote the price of a book left-handed one afternoon. At dawn he wrote a customer's name with his right. One handwriting had a little hook on the g. The other didn't. His watch disappeared and returned. The taped thumbnail was still sore when she saw him in daylight, but he had taken a hot tray out of the oven without favouring it the night before.
These were all things a person could do. People changed watches. Injuries were inconsistent. Marnie herself had gone to collect a prescription with one lens missing from her glasses and noticed only when the pharmacist asked her about it.
The shop was more consistent than its manager. Her tea was always right. The bakery man never had to say which coffee he wanted. An older woman who came after evening classes found a chair waiting close to the heater. Once, just before midnight, Knight carried a new stack of books into the stockroom. Marnie heard a trolley wheel squeal. He came back without the books, passed her table, and picked up her cup exactly where he had left it.
Then he asked, "Did you finish the film?"
"You asked me that when you went in."
"And?"
"I haven't finished it since."
"Worth checking."
She laughed, but the question stayed with her.
At home she went to rgbknights to see whether a name lived somewhere in the profile. It didn't. There was a photograph of Knight holding a stack of books up to his chin, and another in which he had flour on his nose. In a short video he tried to open a parcel while talking about a novel and finally tore the tape with his teeth. The account recommended a detective story she knew he'd disliked.
People changed their minds too.
She didn't ask yet. The next time she came in, she wanted to enjoy a coffee before trying to account for its maker.
It was twenty to eight on a Sunday morning. Marnie had finished a job at seven and sent it off before she could find another reason to keep it. Knight Shift was nearly empty. A student slept upright beside the cookbooks, and a delivery rider was drinking an espresso at the window.
Knight was washing the blue cup.
"Is it still terrible?" he asked as she put A Room in February on the counter.
"No. I'm revising my list of who's terrible."
"That's reading for you."
"I still think Vera could just say no."
He turned the cup over on a cloth. "I do too, actually. She's waiting for her mother to ask her not to leave. Then she can be angry about being asked."
Marnie looked at him.
"You think so?"
"Well, yes. Look at how she behaves when her brother calls. She's already decided."
That was a real objection. Marnie had forgotten the brother's phone call. She opened the book to find it, pleased for a moment to have recovered an ally.
Then she glanced up at the manager's clean thumbnail.
"What happened to her having something her mother hadn't already said for her?"
He reached for the tea tin, then stopped.
"I don't know that she does," he said. "I think she knows exactly what she's doing."
"But you said—"
"That wasn't me."
The espresso machine gave a little sigh. At the window, the rider zipped his jacket and stood up.
Knight took her teapot down from the shelf. "Could you wait until eight?"
"Why?"
"Rafa needs to be here."
"Who's Rafa?"
He looked down at the book between them. "He started the argument."
Marnie had her finger under the line. She could point to it. She could point to his hands, ask about the watch, get all the questions out before he had time to choose better answers.
"And you're not Rafa?"
"No."
She closed the book.
"All right," she said. "I'll wait."
He made the tea. The rider left. Knight set a glass of water beside the sleeping student and gently rescued an open cookbook from under his elbow. Marnie took her usual table, but didn't open her laptop.
At three minutes to eight Marnie heard the back door. She looked round the end of the bookcase. The manager with the blue cup was still beside the till.
Another man came through carrying a carton of milk, in the same black apron. He had the same face.
For a moment Marnie's eyes insisted that one of them was a mirror doing the wrong thing. The arriving man set the carton down. His watch strap was red. His left thumbnail was taped.
"Morning, Marnie."
The man with the blue cup looked at him.
"I've asked her to wait."
The arriving man moved towards the till, the red strap showing below his black cuff. He smiled. "For the next thrilling instalment of whether Vera should be allowed to have a cup of tea?"
"Raf."
"What?"
"Don't just carry on."
Rafa's smile went away. He looked from the book on her table to the cup in the other man's hand. "Right."
They both came over. Marnie had chosen a two-person table. Rafa fetched another chair and the shop's copy of the book; the other man turned one backwards and sat with his arms along its top.
"Rafa," the one with the tape said. "Raf, mostly."
"Bram."
Marnie tried out the names silently. Neither face attached itself to a single visit. She looked at Raf when she meant to look at Bram, then looked down, annoyed with herself.
"There are two of you."
Raf rubbed his forehead.
"Three," Bram said. "Triplets."
"Oh, come on."
"Yes," Raf said. "We get that a lot."
"Or we used to," said Bram.
From somewhere above them came the thump of a footfall. Raf took out his phone, hesitated, then put it on the table.
"I said her mother didn't get to decide how long she took," he told Marnie. "The other bit was Gil."
"The silence?"
"Yes. He'd read it when he took over from me. I wrote something in the margin. He wrote something back."
"We argued about it over breakfast," Bram said. "I still think she's being a pain."
Raf opened the shop's copy. There were two small marks beside the passage, one in ordinary pencil, one green. Marnie had seen both of them before.
"You said you'd been thinking about it," she said.
"He had," said Raf.
It was a perfectly good answer. It didn't tell her where to look.
"Could I meet him?"
Raf glanced at Bram, who lifted one shoulder.
"If he's awake," Marnie added.
Raf picked up the phone. A minute later Gil came downstairs with a green pencil tucked behind his ear and his sweatshirt on inside out. The neck label sat beneath his chin. He was carrying a banana.
"What's happened?"
He saw his brothers sitting at Marnie's table and stopped chewing.
"Oh."
"Sorry," Raf said.
Gil pulled the pencil out from behind his ear. "Did you tell her there were three of us?"
"Yes."
"Good. Last time you said 'a few' and made us sound like mice."
He brought over a fourth chair, picked up the shop's book, and looked at the two marks beside Vera's silence.
Marnie sat very still while the table became crowded. She recognized Gil's particular way of putting a book down with his finger holding its place. She hadn't known it was particular until now.
"Do you really do this all the time?"
"Most customers come at the same time every day," Raf said. "They don't need an explanation."
"You come at all hours," Bram told her.
"I do," Marnie said.
"It used to be everyone asking to get all three of us out," Gil said. "Then a photo. Then which one was the clever one."
"It wasn't you," Bram told Gil.
Gil nudged his chair with his foot.
"We didn't plan it at first," Raf said. "Someone mistook Gil for me. He sold them the book I'd recommended. They came back and said thanks."
"I liked it better than he did," Gil said. "He told me to read it so he could complain properly."
Raf turned the shop's copy of A Room in February between his hands. "It was nice to be asked about a book."
The student woke and looked towards the counter. Raf got up to make his coffee. As he passed Gil, he took the green pencil from him; Gil handed it over without looking. The student asked Raf how long he'd been awake.
"Long enough to know you want two shots."
Marnie almost laughed. She stopped herself only because she wanted to hear what else Gil might say.
"The knights were before the shop," Gil said, touching the helmet on Bram's apron. "Three cardboard helmets. Red, green, blue. We used to film things."
"Bad things," said Bram.
"You were in them."
"I know how bad they were."
They had kept the name for the account. Kept the face too, Marnie thought, watching Raf pass a coffee over the counter. She remembered the video of the parcel being opened with teeth.
"Which of you does that?"
"What?"
She described it.
"Me," Bram said.
"He's banned from opening stock," Gil said.
Raf came back with the student's money still in his hand. He looked at it, swore softly, and went to the till.
Marnie waited for him to sit down, then drew her book closer. Some visits were beginning to separate: the green pencil, the hot tray, the cup full of teaspoons. Others wouldn't. She had wanted to ask Knight what he'd meant, and now all three of them were here, with none of them quite containing the conversation she'd brought back.
"I'd thought I was coming back to the same person," she said.
"We let you," Raf said. He put Gil's pencil on the table.
"Next time, will you tell me which one you are?"
"Yes," Raf said.
"I can do that," said Gil.
Bram nodded. "Me too."
"Gil, does it matter if Vera already knows her answer?" Marnie asked, looking at Bram.
"Gil's there," Bram said quietly, nodding towards his brother.
She turned and had to begin the question again. Gil waited until she'd finished.
"I don't know," he said. "I was sure yesterday."
"Oh," Marnie said. She took a sip of her tea.
"Do you write the reviews together?" she asked.
"Sometimes," Gil said.
"The hostage situation with a map?"
"The hostage situation was mine," Raf said. "Gil kept trying to make me admire the map."
"It was a good map," Gil said.
"I put those together," said Bram. "They cut my best jokes."
"Sometimes they're not good jokes, Bram."
Marnie smiled at him before she remembered to look for his name. It was the same smile she'd had for Knight. This time Bram was the one who received it.
Raf opened the shop's book and laid it beside hers.
"I still think she gets to take her time," he said.
"She does," Bram said. "That doesn't mean she's using it well."
Gil found the brother's phone call and read it again. Marnie leaned across to see. Raf shifted the teapot away from her sleeve.
"He's not asking her to stay either," Gil said. "He's asking when she's leaving."
"Exactly," said Bram.
"That doesn't make you right."
"It makes me a bit right."
Marnie turned back to the mother's question. The blue mug stood against Bram's elbow. He had brought it with him when he left the counter.
"Why that one?" she asked.
"Chip in the bottom. Nobody ever puts it out for customers."
He pushed it out of her way and bent over the page. There was so much pencil in the shop's copy that the brothers had begun to write in the gap between two paragraphs.
Bram tapped a line with his finger.
"Hang on," he said. "Why's her mother still got her coat on?"