These Dreams of You

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As Molly disappears down the road from Cartwright Gardens, Sheba watches her as intently as she did from the pub window. Zan waits to see if the woman looks back and convinces himself that at one point she’s paused, for the slightest of moments, summoning the will to stare straight ahead.

She’s pretty, more round than heavy, and has some of the extraterrestrial features of Ethiopians. She doesn’t look anything like Sheba who, Zan remembers, takes after her handsome father. Perhaps the very strange thought that will grow stranger and bigger in his head never would have occurred to him if he and the children hadn’t seen her outside the pub, returning the girl’s watch with her own, or if she hadn’t told him where she was born. “Good lord,” he can hear Viv exclaiming in front of the laptop a few weeks ago, staring at her email. “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany?”