The Floor Measurement

I count the three mistakes that landed us in this double room at the Best Western in Uppsala: the booking agent’s typo, my department head’s blindness, and my own failure to check the confirmation email. Three strikes, for a woman who has spent the last decade making sure there were none.

It is ten o’clock. The corridor is silent. We are the only ones in the room.

Kwame stands by the window, watching the snow fall on the cobblestones with the calm of a man who plans for contingencies. He wears a charcoal coat that fits his broad shoulders perfectly, the wool thick enough to keep out the February bite. His hands are large, the knuckles scarred from years of handling archival boxes and heavy crates of primary sources. He is a historian of the same caliber as me, which is why we are co-authoring the monograph on colonial trade routes, though we have only met twice before this conference.