The cab driver asks if I want him to wait. I tell him no and pay him for the wrong reason: saying yes would have kept a line of retreat open, and I have decided not to keep one.
The pavement outside the house in Stoke Newington is wet without raining. The light has gone the color of the inside of a coat pocket. The front door is dark green — the older shade, the one that has been on this door since before either of us was born, repainted by every owner including, last summer, my sister.
I have a wheeled suitcase, a leather weekend bag with everything in it I am unwilling to lose, and the gray folder, which I am carrying separately because putting it in either bag felt wrong in a way I have not had time to examine.
The lift of my hand towards the bell is interrupted by the door opening before I touch it.
Bram stands in the doorway. He holds the doorway. The cuff of his shirt is no longer folded once, the way it was in Pemberton's office at half past ten this morning. It is folded twice. He has been moving, in this house, in the hours since Mayfair, and the cuff is the only evidence.
"You came," he says.
"I said I would."
"You said you would think about it."
"I did. Then I came."
He looks at the suitcase. He looks at the folder. The doorway is the part of him I have to walk past.
"There's a room made up. Second floor, end of the hall."
"Whose."
"Mine, until I moved up." A pause; the pause is the part of the sentence. "It's the guest room now."
I step over the threshold. He has to move to let me through, and he does it economically, in a way that takes less space than a man his size should be able to manage.
The hall smells of beeswax. Not the cedar-and-paper kind from Pemberton's office; a softer one. Underneath it, something else, fainter, that I cannot name yet. Sandalwood, perhaps. Something else.
The walls are the color my sister chose: a chalky off-white she sourced from a place in Pimlico that still does old paints the proper way. There is a brass coat hook by the door, three coats on it, all dark, all his. The fourth hook is empty. The gap is the loudest object in the hall.
Halfway down the hall, on the right, is a photograph of my sister. She is on a beach. She is laughing at something off-camera. The frame is plain wood. The photograph is recent.
He has not taken it down.
I walk past it without slowing. The part of me that catalogs things catalogs it: location, frame, condition, who likely took the picture. The rest of me follows him towards the kitchen stairs.
The kitchen is in the lower-ground, where I knew it would be. A wide room with a glazed door to the small garden, a long oak table, an island Bram built for Neve two years ago with reclaimed elm. She told me about the elm, with a particular note in her voice that I now identify as proud. He has left two lamps on. The overhead is dark.
There is food on the table. A small loaf, butter, cheese, some cold meat, a tomato salad with too much oil. None of it is anything Neve made. None of it is the kind of thing Neve made. He has shopped today, on the way back from Mayfair, and what he bought is what a man buys when he is consciously not cooking.
"I didn't know what you eat."
"I eat everything."
"That isn't what your sister told me."
"My sister was rounding down."
He looks at me. First time, since the doorway, directly. There is gray under his eyes the Mayfair light had kept from me. The look is steady.
"What did she round down."
"Onions. Olives. Anchovies. I'll have anchovies on anything."
"I'll remember."
I have no idea what to do with the sentence. I sit at the table.
He sits at the corner, two chairs over, the position of a man unsure whether proximity is a kindness or an imposition. He pours water. He passes me the loaf. He eats less than I do. I eat because eating gives my hands something to do, and because if I do not eat now I will eat later in the dark.
We do not speak about the will. We do not speak about Friday. We speak, in the small portions in which we speak at all, about the boiler, which is loud at two in the morning; about the bin collection, which is on a Wednesday; about the alarm code, which he writes on a piece of paper and slides across the table without comment.
The number on the paper is Neve's birthday.
I put the paper in my pocket.
The front room is visible through the kitchen-stair doorway when I look up from clearing my plate. Our phones are on the coffee table; I set mine down on the way in without thinking, beside his, because the table was bare otherwise. From this angle, both cases look like the same case photographed twice. Dark brown leather. Identical stitching. The leather on his has begun to soften at the corners; mine, newer, has not. I know these cases. Neve sent me one last birthday. I think she sent him his at the same time. The one she sent me is at the bottom of a drawer in Notting Hill, unused. I am the kind of woman who does not put a phone in a case.
Bram, washing a knife at the sink, sees what I am looking at through the doorway. He does not turn around. He says nothing about it. He puts the knife in the rack and dries his hand on a tea towel.
"I'll show you the rooms," he says.
The tour, such as it is, is the shortest tour I have been given of a house this size.
Front room — seen. Dining room he and Neve never used, books open face-down on the table where plates should be. Half-landing. First floor: bathroom; his room with the door pulled to, no light under it; the guest room with the door open and the bed turned down. Second-floor landing: three doors, all closed. He passes the rooms in silence.
He turns to go back down.
On the half-landing he stops with one hand on the rail. The other hand he keeps in his pocket the way a man keeps a hand in a pocket so that it does not do anything by itself.
"There's a study on the third floor. It was hers. I haven't —" He picks the sentence up somewhere else. "I haven't gone in. I won't, this week. If you want to, you do it on your own timing. Not mine."
"All right."
"All right."
The word does different work in his mouth than in mine. In mine it closes a thing. In his it opens one and leaves the door open behind it.
He puts my suitcase outside the guest room door. He leaves it at the threshold. He stops a step short of the doorway and steps back so the room is mine to enter.
"Towels in the cabinet," he says. "Hot water at the second tap, not the first." A pause. "The window above the bath sticks until summer if you shut it all the way. Don't shut it all the way."
"Thank you."
"For what."
The question is real. He waits for it.
"For the bread."
A breath that is not a laugh. "Goodnight, Seren."
He goes down. The kitchen light stays on after him. I hear him pour water into a glass and stand drinking it without sitting down.
The guest room is small and tidy and impersonal in the particular way of rooms made up by someone who lives elsewhere. The bedspread is new. The sheets are new. The pillows are too soft and there are too many — the kind of arrangement a man makes when he has overcorrected for the possibility that a woman might want pillows.
From the bag: toothbrush; a T-shirt to sleep in; the paper with the alarm code.
The gray folder I set on the writing desk under the window, where the bed can see it. I leave it closed and visible. Not in a drawer. Not on a shelf. Where my eye lands on it.
In the bathroom I take off the ring.
This is the new part of the day, the part I have not done at a different sink in a different city. I set the ring on a small Delft dish that someone — Neve, presumably, who else — bought to hold a single ring, in the way a person buys small useless objects for a house when she is in love with the house. The ring fits the dish the way that ring fits a dish my father once said he had been meaning to buy and never did.
The absence on my hand registers as a change in the air around the finger. In the morning I will put it back on before I stand up. That part stays.
Back in the bedroom I go to the window before the bed.
The garden is a black rectangle. The neighbors' kitchen on the right is lit yellow; the neighbors' kitchen on the left is dark. The plane at the end of the garden has lost most of its leaves, and what is left moves without sound. The sky above the rooftops is the kind of London sky that is never properly dark because the city is leaking light back up at it.
I look up because there is something to look up at.
The third floor of this house, above me, throws a square of light onto the lawn. It is the only light on the third floor. It is on the right-hand side, the back of the house. It is the room he said he had not gone into.
The lamp in my sister's study is on.
It was on when I came up the path from the cab. I had not registered it because I was registering the door and the man at it. It has been on, I now understand, since she died.
I stand at the window longer than I came over to stand. The cold from the glass reaches me through the cardigan. Downstairs, eventually, I hear him climb to the second-floor landing and stop, and then go up to the third. He walks past her study and into the bedroom that was theirs, and the door closes softly enough that I have to listen for it to know it has shut.
The lamp stays on.
I don't know yet that this is the last room I'll go into.
The unfamiliar bed takes me. The sheets smell of nothing — of detergent, which is the smell sheets have when they are trying not to smell of anything. I lie on my back. The square of light from the study above is too far off to throw onto the ceiling, but I look at the place where it would be if the geometry allowed, and I think about it.
She did not turn it off. He did not turn it off. The lamp is doing the thing a lamp does when nobody has decided what to do with it.
Somewhere on the floor above, in a room where I have not yet been, the lamp goes on burning.