Emina always sent voice messages. Short ones, usually while waiting for a bus: I'll be there in ten minutes, buy some bread, I fancy something spicy today. Mirza played them twice because he liked her voice. They had met at a mutual friend's birthday, both recently past fifty. After three months he knew how she took her coffee and why she disliked Sunday markets. He did not know that reading a long menu required a serious effort from her.
Once she sent him a written message. Her phone would not record sound, so she slowly typed where he should meet her. She misspelled several words. In his reply, Mirza repeated one mistake beside a laughing face. Emina deleted their conversation before the bus arrived. When he called, she said she did not feel like going out.
Three days later they met outside the bakery. She would not let him begin with coffee and the weather forecast. She said she had left school long ago, had spent years recognising what she needed and hiding the rest. Now she was attending adult classes. She read slowly. His joke had taken her back among children tapping pencils while she stumbled at the blackboard.
Mirza apologised. Then, wanting to make things right, he offered to bring texts for her to practise with every evening. Emina let him finish his plan. 'I have a teacher,' she said. 'I wanted to go out with you.' He looked at her for several moments, then removed his hands from the railing he had been gripping. He asked whether she would like to walk to the river. He did not offer to read her anything along the way.
They continued seeing each other, more cautiously than before. When she asked for help, he gave it. When she lingered over a sign, he stopped guessing whether to step in. Sometimes he got things wrong and she grew angry. One Thursday she brought him a short story she had read all the way through in class. She told him the ending before the beginning and spoiled the surprise, so they laughed at something entirely different.
For his birthday she wrote a card with four sentences. She read them aloud while he sat on a kitchen chair, dressed for dinner. At the third she paused, recognised her own mistake, and corrected it in pencil. Mirza waited. The fourth sentence was the one that made her hand tremble most, and there was not a difficult word in it.