Mira learned early that staying was a skill.
Most people thought courage looked like movement—leaving, changing, becoming something else. But Mira had discovered another kind. The kind that meant sitting still when things grew uncomfortable. The kind that meant keeping your hand steady when someone else's world was shaking.
On the morning everything shifted, the bookstore smelled like dust and rain. The bell above the door rang at exactly 9:07 a.m., same as always, but Mira felt it—an almost invisible wrongness in the air, like a sentence that didn't end where it should have.
She was halfway through restocking the poetry shelf when he walked in.
He didn't browse. Didn't look around. He just stood there, hands shoved into his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the floor as if the ground might explain something the rest of the world refused to. People like that came in sometimes. People who weren't looking for books, not really.
Mira didn't ask if he needed help.
She finished placing the last book back on the shelf, straightened it twice, then said gently, "The chairs by the window are warmer in the morning."
He looked up, surprised—not because she spoke, but because she hadn't asked anything of him.
He nodded and sat.
Minutes passed. Then more. Outside, buses hissed and pulled away. Inside, pages turned, the clock ticked, and Mira did what she always did best: she stayed. She rang up customers, recommended novels, smiled when appropriate. She did not watch him, but she did not forget he was there.
Eventually, he spoke.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do next."
It wasn't loud. It wasn't dramatic. It was simply true.
Mira closed the register, walked over, and sat in the chair across from him. She didn't offer advice. She didn't say everything would be okay. She said the only honest thing she could.
"Then you don't have to do anything yet."
He breathed out, like someone who had been holding the weight of the world in his lungs.
And in that small bookstore, with its crooked shelves and secondhand stories, something important happened—not a solution, not a miracle—but a pause. A place where nothing demanded answers.
Mira liked moments like that.
They were proof that sometimes, being there was enough.