The visitor said her name was Selina and she had known Milena's husband. A month after the funeral, that was not unusual. People still arrived with stories, returned books, and more food than the fridge needed. Milena invited her into the kitchen and asked whether she wanted coffee. Selina looked at the shelf above the sink. 'You still keep his blue cup,' she said, then closed her mouth as though the sentence could be taken back.
The cup was nothing special. He had bought it at a petrol station and refused to discard it despite its cracked handle. Milena asked how Selina knew about it. The woman lowered her gaze to the table. They had been seeing each other for four years. Sometimes he came to her flat before work and talked about mornings at home, coffee cooling while he searched for glasses. Milena sat before the water boiled.
She did not request details about places or dates. She asked whether Selina had known he was married. She had. That brief, unadorned answer allowed Milena to remain at the table. She did not have to hear that the marriage had long been empty, because it had not. They had good days, ordinary arguments, an arranged trip that would never happen. And alongside everything there had been another woman. She did not know where to put a fact that cancelled no memory yet passed through every one.
Selina said she had come asking for nothing. Then she asked whether she might have one of his books. Milena looked towards the sitting room. All the books remained as he had left them. She said no. Not now. Selina nodded, stood, and pushed her chair under the table herself. Milena did not offer the coffee she had never finished making. She accompanied her to the door without asking whether she would call again.
That night her greatest anger was having nobody to ask the second question. The first was why. She could not even formulate the second. In the morning she called her sister and told her everything before grief occupied her whole language again. Her sister did not tell her to remember only the good. She came, washed several plates, and stayed until lunch.
Milena moved the blue cup to another shelf. She neither broke it nor gave it away. Sometimes she forgot it for days; sometimes she saw it immediately on entering the kitchen. When she first took a short trip alone, she brought a new little cup with a lid. At the hotel she drank coffee beside the window without needing to decide that morning what her entire marriage had been.