Tea for two Leni Korhonen Tea for two Jane looked up from the kettle, her face placid as a still pond. “And file what, precisely? Your regrets or mine?” Leni Korhonen An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book Tea for two Tea for two Leni Korhonen Leni Korhonen An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Tea for two I t was a house with three bedrooms, two bath- rooms, and now curiously, only two inhabitants. The children had grown. They had not been ex- iled nor banished, only permitted, as was the fashion, to seek lives of their own with trembling indepen- dence and mismatched cutlery. “I suppose we could turn Emma’s room into a study,” Robert said on the first Thursday after the final departure, which had come with tearful good- byes, promises to call, and an Uber with a busted tail- light. Jane looked up from the kettle, her face placid as a still pond. “And file what, precisely? Your regrets or mine?” Leni Korhonen He flinched, though the remark was made with all the elegance and civility of a true Austenian wife, measured, soft, and scalpel-sharp. The truth, unspoken but known, lay between them like the old Labrador used to before she passed: faith- fully inconvenient and often in the way. Robert sat at the kitchen table, his coffee cooling by the second. “We could take a trip.” Jane placed the teacup down, china, cracked, one of a set. “A trip where we’d pretend we haven’t spent twenty-three years living as co-parents rather than lovers?” Her tone was calm. Civilised. As was expect- ed of a woman raised on the merits of restraint and raspberry jam. He sighed, long and slow. “That’s unfair.” “No, darling. It’s simply unflattering.” Their eyes met, and there it was that ancient ache. Not new, not raw, but weathered and well-practiced. The pain of people who had once shared everything and now couldn’t even share the silence properly. The evenings passed oddly. Too much space on the sofa. Too much time between meals. No mess, no Tea for two noise. The house had become a cathedral to What Used To Be, and every footstep echoed a little too loudly. One evening, Jane found herself rearranging books that no longer needed rearranging. “You used to write,” Robert said gently from the doorway, his hands in his pockets, as if unsure of his welcome. She turned slowly. “And you used to play the pia- no.” They stood like that, two ghosts in their own lives. She wondered when his hair had gone so grey. He wondered when her shoulders had begun to stoop. The soft light from the hallway made her look like a woman in an oil painting. Still, poised, quietly sad. He tried again. “Maybe... we could try something new. A class. Pottery?” She laughed. Not cruelly. But as a woman who had seen the boy she married turn into a man who need- ed schedules to flirt. “Robert. We are not clay. We are porcelain. We’ve already been fired.” Still, he stayed. That was something. Even as the Leni Korhonen weeks folded over themselves, a neatly pressed series of Tuesdays and chicken dinners, they kept talking. One night, as rain streaked the window like smudged ink on a love letter, Jane turned to him. “I miss when the house was loud. Don’t you?” Robert nodded. “I miss when you looked at me like I was your home.” There was silence. Long. Careful. Sacred. Jane whispered, “I miss having someone to write letters to.” He looked down. “And I miss music.” They were not bad people. They had loved as best they could. But sometimes love, like jam left uncov- ered, just spoils when unattended. One Sunday morning, she dressed earlier than usual. Light blue cardigan, pressed skirt, and the tiny gold locket she hadn’t worn in years. Robert noticed. “Going somewhere?” “I think I’ll walk,” she said, smoothing a crease that wasn’t there. “Just to the old chapel garden. There’s a bench I like.” Tea for two He offered a weak smile. “May I come?” She hesitated only a moment. “If you like.” The garden was quiet. Damp with spring. The air smelled of lilacs and earth and something else— something old and restless. They sat. “I used to imagine we’d grow old together like in a novel,” she said softly. He smiled. “Which one?” “Not Persuasion ,” she said. “More like Mansfield Park . All the right people in the wrong places.” He chuckled, quietly. “I thought we were more Emma . Interfering, hopeful, and charmingly mis- guided.” She turned to him then, with a smile that held both sorrow and affection. “No, Robert. We were Northanger Abbey . We mis- took the ordinary for extraordinary and forgot that real life is more dreadful than any Gothic tale.” The breeze fluttered, lifting her cardigan slightly. Leni Korhonen She looked fragile then. Not because she was old, but because she had been brave for too long. He reached for her hand. She let him. “I don’t know what comes next,” he admitted. Jane looked at their hands, his still rough, hers cool and smooth. “Perhaps nothing does. And that’s the hardest part.” He blinked back something that wasn’t quite tears. “I’m still here.” She squeezed his hand. “Yes,” she said. “But I think I’m not.” That night, Jane wrote a letter. A final one. Folded neatly, sealed with wax. She left it on her desk beside a teacup, still warm. By morning, Robert found her in bed, her hand over her chest, the gold locket cool against her skin. Peaceful. Finished. A woman who had loved once, fiercely. And who had chosen, at last, to rest. He wept. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But with the sorrow of a man who had misplaced a thing slowly Tea for two and only realised it when he could not ask where it had gone. Later, he sat at the table, her letter unopened. And finally, quietly, he played the piano. Just once. Tea for two. And none for the rest. END Leni Korhonen Tea for two Leni Korhonen Ovi eBook Publishing 2025 Ovi eBook Publishing Design: Thanos Tea for two Ovi eBooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Leni Korhonen Leni Korhonen Tea for two Jane looked up from the kettle, her face placid as a still pond. “And file what, precisely? Your regrets or mine?” Leni Korhonen. Left calculus and part of my life for three kids and a divorce but writing never left me it’s just took a few decades till i decide to expose it further than my notebooks and my computer. For best or worst it works cathartically for me.