He thought of the platitudes that one might offer in a situation like this: how sure he was that her parents must have been proud, and words to that effect. But in truth, he didn't know. Oisin had little experience with parents, or families, and none whatsoever with the Weavers. They might have been the most loving relatives that had ever lived, or unrepentant monsters that Ava was better off without, a detail excluded from her offered narrative like the explicit details scrubbed from a story before it was presented to a child. Oisin had no desire to speak with authority on a matter with which he was not an expert, and that extended not just to her family, but to her shop as well.
He settled upon a simple response, both honest, and accurate, and delivered with good humour and a smile. "It's certainly the nicest fabric merchant I've ever visited."
Oisin edged them forward as Ava posed her own question, giving it the careful consideration that it deserved. He thought of what Ava herself had shared, and of the kind of answer she might expect to receive in response. Enough to explain, but not too much. Still that careful restraint, that concession to civility without straying too far into familiarity. It was helpful, defining the parameters for their conversation without Oisin needing to determine them for himself. Yet, the question she posed was both easy and hard to answer. There was a simple response that offered nothing, and a more comprehensive answer that shared the very fundamentals of who Oisin was as a person. How to thread the needle between the two?
His attention strayed, but not to the display of pastries spread before them, the often heaving shelves now broken and interrupted by voids and vacancies that suggested it might have been a lucrative day for the Baker's Treat. Instead they settled on the youngest of the family of bakers: on Catomi Bloom, the daughter of Oisin's huge-personalitied landlady, Marla Bloom, and granddaughter of the grizzled old baker Ewart Bloom, who seemed to exist in a perpetual state of dismay at the way his daughter had usurped the business from under him, and stolen away his privacy and independence so that his former apartment could be rented to some strange out-of-towner journalist. All three of them were present, going through the motions of winding down their culinary efforts for the evening, and making the bakery clean and ready for the following day; but it was only Catomi that caught Oisin's eye, deliberately, tucking a single strand of the vibrant explosion of copper curls behind her ear, and offering the smallest, most sheepish of smiles. She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, but then her eyes strayed for the briefest of moments, and as they settled on Ava, the prospect of a greeting seemed to fade from her thoughts completely, her attention returning instead to the pan she had been tasked with scrubbing clean.
Something had happened, Oisin was sure of it, but there were too many narratives happening simultaneously in his head for him to consider it now. Catomi was someone he could speak to later, check in on before she went home to be sure that everything was okay. With Ava's question, he didn't have the same luxury of deferring until later.
"I don't know if I have always wanted to tell stories," he admitted, with a furrow of his brow that suggested he wasn't entirely satisfied with his own answer. "But I've always liked stories. Back in Old Rose Harbor, they were like a precious treasure, things that I was told and that I had to clutch in my mind so that they wouldn't slip away. They were these perfect places, these wonderfully simple people and logical events that made more sense to me than the real world ever did. It wasn't until I jouned the mercenaries, and learned to read for myself, that I started to realise that stories didn't have to be as simple as the ones I was told as a child; and then I started to realise that everything was a story, if you looked at it the right way."
He offered a slight shrug, hands seeking the comfort of disappearing into his pockets. "Finding and understanding the story of things makes life a little easier for me. I suppose that by being a journalist, by doing the work of translating the world into simpler stories, I can make life a little easier to understand for others as well."