Jasna received the trip as a gift from colleagues who said she needed some peace. On the bus she answered her phone loudly three times. The guide, Mladen, said nothing. He simply handed her a sheet of instructions with silence at the top. Jasna folded it and put it away. She was fifty-two and disliked being brought up by strangers before her first coffee.

At the edge of the marsh, the group arranged themselves behind a wooden fence. Mladen explained that they were waiting for a bird rarely seen in that location. Jasna could not even tell the two ducks in front of her apart. She moved away, sat on a bench and finally switched off her phone. Her former husband was removing his last boxes from their apartment that day. She did not want to know whether he had found a charger, a folder or another reason to call.

Mladen approached with spare binoculars. She told him he did not have to pretend to be kind to a bad participant. He sat at the other end of the bench and admitted that he had fallen asleep on his first trip. He had been working nights in a bakery, while the woman he was dating wanted to spend time in nature. The relationship had failed; the habit had remained. For the first time that morning, Jasna laughed without trying to hide anything.

He showed her a nest that looked abandoned. As he explained why birds did not always return to the same spot, she thought he was offering consolation. She said she did not want life lessons drawn from nature. Mladen looked confused, then explained that he had meant the receding water. Her mistake was so embarrassing that they both started laughing. The other participants turned towards them.

At that moment the rare bird flew behind their bench. Everyone saw it except them. Mladen had to listen to excited descriptions, and Jasna offered to take the blame. He refused. On the journey back he sat across the aisle from her instead of in the guide's seat. They talked about bakery shifts, bad gifts and places where a person could sleep sitting up, without making a single grand confession.

Beside the bus he gave her a schedule of future trips. Jasna asked whether he ever took anyone for coffee without binoculars. He said that was not yet part of his service. "Then expand the business," she replied. At home she found the keys neatly arranged and part of the wardrobe empty. She did not immediately become fond of the silence. Still, she pinned the schedule to her fridge and saved the number written on its reverse under his name, without adding the word guide.