I don’t remember how I came upon this story, which seems only to be available online, but it has stayed with me, and I have been back to re-read it perhaps five times. It is very simple and gentle and reserved, it never says too much, in a mistress-piece of convincing world and character building, that makes me believe entirely in a trader gradually falling in love with a woman he is escorting to her marriage to a husband whom she has not met. They part, each having learned a great deal from the other about how to live and what to care about.

First published in Psychopomp, March 2011, and available to read here