Etta Vale had learned to read the city by its surfaces. Not the obvious maps—street signs, traffic lights, the grid of tram lines—but the way glass and polished metal kept their own notes: a surface worn dull by a hundred palms, a shop window that held the afterimage of a face for a full breath after the real person had moved away, an office tower whose mirrored skin stored, like a fog, a dozen half-finished gestures. She thought of her work as translation. People brought her panes that had been pitted by time or marred by careless contractors, and Etta coaxed them back toward clarity. Mostly she patched faults that were literal—chips, scratches, failedsilvering—but there were repairs that required something older than solvents or resin: a slow, ceremonial coaxing of an image into cooperation with light. Ruth Kest, who had apprenticed her and had more recipes for forgotten glass than a city has alleys, called those moments “arrangements.” Etta called them miracles.
Her shop occupied a narrow ground-floor room on a block of mid-century storefronts. It smelled of vinegar, the sweet burn of polishing compound, and the faint, impossible scent of lemon oil that always lived in glass no matter how thoroughly it had been scrubbed. She kept a pot of tea on the counter that went cold between customers and a stack of ledger sheets where she tracked commissions in a handwriting so neat it could be mistaken for a plan. The window above the workbench looked out on a lane where light glinted off wet cobbles in winter and the faces of people passed by as if through thin water. Once, the lane had been a safe, private place for her to keep her grief. Her brother Jonah had walked there every evening before the accident—before he fell through a seam of a shopfront mirror five years ago and the police found no evidence and the city offered no answers. “Gone,” the city said; Ruth refused that verb. Etta kept a pocket of expectation like an ember inside her and fed it with work.
The city had rules now. There was an official Office of Reflective Regulation that put placards on glass where tourists might gather and issued advisory statements after aberrant reports. They maintained a pragmatic tone: reflections could be disorienting, they declared; please do not attempt direct contact. The notices were bureaucratic in their calm, but anyone who spent enough time around the panes knew the undertone—the city was organizing what had once been accidental, and the more the ORR standardized, the less improvisation the surfaces would tolerate. Etta resented that cold arithmetic. She had seen panes that kept the laughter of a child for a season and others that clung to regret for a decade. Those things could not be folded into forms without harm.
She was alone in the shop the morning Marco Lin arrived, carrying a shoulder bag of prints. Marco’s work—street photography, quick stark frames of the city’s overlooked faces—had been useful to the restorers as a way to study light at a distance. He looked like he had slept in the wrong cafe: a smeared scarf, hair more untidy than usable, a camera bag dented from too many afternoons squeezed into tram seats. He shook his head the way a man giving bad news does and set a photo on her counter. "You should see this with fresh eyes," he said. "Not the ones that blink when the world expects sense."