The Selvedge He Was Never Shown

He has entered me into his Register tonight, Corvus, and entered nothing — no finding, no category, no number appended to a name. He names what I did not do: did not speak, did not pay, did not let a stranger’s gift become, in the wearing, a debt owed to me instead of to the man who actually risked something for her leaving. He calls this a restraint he fails most nights to practice on his own paper. He is not wrong. He has simply never once, in years of disagreeing with me across a market square, told me he was looking closely enough to see it.

I stitch my selvedge mark where no buyer’s eye has ever been trained to travel — small, folded under, proof for no market but my own that the hand was mine. I have told myself for years this was modesty. Tonight a man who keeps no loom, who has never once touched silk without first asking whether it was evidence, found the mark anyway, from across the whole Bazaar, without being shown where to look, and set it beside a drowned man’s net in his own flat hand, and called it finding nothing.

He thinks declining to catalogue me is the gift. He does not understand that being read this closely, by someone I was certain only pretended not to, is a different silk entirely — one I did not weave, cannot sign, and would not unpick for every dram of this season’s last indigo.

I will not tell him this. Some debts are not mine to settle in his hearing either.