The first flat had a kitchen with no window and a landlord who called the bedroom generous.
I stood in the doorway, looking at the space between the bed and the wall.
“Generous to whom?”
He laughed as if I had made a delightful joke. I had not intended to.
There was nothing wrong with the place that I could afford to be indignant about. It was clean. It was near work. It would fit the things I had decided to keep if I learned to live sideways. But standing inside it, I felt the same shrinking sensation I had felt when Richard described how reasonable his arrangement could be.
I thanked the landlord and left without apologizing for taking his time.
Outside, I called Ruth.
“No.”
“That bad?”
“Not bad. Wrong.”
“Those are different.”
“I’m trying to remember.”
She told me about a notice in the bakery window near the workshop. I had seen the bakery but not the notice. I went there on foot, taking the long way through the market because I did not want another appointment yet.
At a stall, I bought a small bunch of red tulips.
The stallholder recognized me and looked surprised.
“You could get these wholesale.”
“I know.”
“They’re a bit open.”
“I like them.”
I carried them wrapped in brown paper, feeling extravagant in a way that had nothing to do with the cost. I bought flowers for customers, for tables, for occasions. I could not remember when I had last carried a bunch home because I wanted to watch it change.
The bakery smelled wonderful. I bought a bun and asked about the flat. The woman behind the counter called upstairs, and a man appeared with flour on his sleeve.
“I haven’t cleaned it properly yet,” he warned.
“I’ve seen worse today.”
He led me up a narrow staircase. The banister was smooth from use. At the top, a small landing opened into a living room with two windows and a kitchen tucked behind a half wall. The bedroom ceiling sloped. The bathroom was plain and clean. Someone had left a little wooden table beside the window.
I set the tulips on it while he showed me the heating.
“You’d get the smell,” he said apologetically.
“Of bread?”
“Early. Very early.”
“I work early.”
He told me the rent, the deposit, the bills. I did the sums in my head, then made myself do them again on my phone. It would be a stretch during the move but possible, with the business keeping its working reserve and the personal funds Anjana had helped me identify kept separate. I did not have to turn the flat into another uncertain favor.
“Six months to begin with?” I asked.
“That would suit me.”
He went downstairs to get the details, leaving me alone.
I walked from one room to the next. There was no space for a grand version of my future, but there was space for a bed, the chest my mother had painted, a chair I would choose because I liked sitting in it. The little table could hold flowers without being part of a display.
I stood at the living-room window. Below, a woman was arguing cheerfully with the stallholder about the price of pears. A child in a pushchair dropped a glove. Someone picked it up and ran after them.
Downstairs, someone laughed. I wondered how much of the bakery I would hear in the mornings.
When the landlord returned, I asked for the application and the tenancy terms to read.
I told Adam that evening, before I had signed anything.
We were at his house. He had made soup, and I had brought the tulips because the flat above the bakery was not mine yet and I did not want to leave them in the car.
“Above a bakery,” he said.
“Try to conceal your envy.”
He smiled, then looked at the flowers.
“I was going to ask whether you wanted to stay here for a while. After the move.”
I put down my spoon.
“I thought you might.”
“Is that why you found somewhere?”
“No.” I stopped, then corrected myself. “Partly. Not because I don’t want to be here. Because it would be easy to come here while everything else is difficult and never decide whether living together was what we wanted.”
He listened, looking at the table.
“I’d like to live with you,” he said.
The words went through me with an unexpected force.
“Now?”
“Not necessarily now. But I don’t want to pretend the idea hasn’t occurred to me.”
I reached for his hand.
“It’s occurred to me too.”
“And?”
“I’d like to know how we are when there isn’t a deadline hanging over me.”
He nodded. I could see disappointment, but not resentment. He was allowing the answer to be complicated.
“Six months,” I said. “That’s the first tenancy. It doesn’t have to mean anything about us beyond where I sleep when I’m not here.”
“And where I sleep when I’m not there.”
I smiled. “If you behave.”
“A difficult condition.”
We finished the soup. Afterward he found a jug for the tulips and filled it with water. The stems bent toward the lamp, already beginning to lean.
“They won’t stay upright,” I said.
“I gathered.”
“Don’t keep cutting them to make them behave.”
He looked at me over the jug. “I was planning to admire them.”
I kissed him. He put the jug down before kissing me back.
Two days later, after reading the terms and checking the figures, I signed for the flat. I took the keys to the workshop and put them beside the yellow kettle.
Ruth picked them up, weighed them in her palm, and handed them back.
“Well,” she said. “Now we need to find you a decent chair.”
Iris knocked on the flat door holding a suitcase handle in one hand and a phone in the other.
For one disorienting second, I was back in the hallway on the first day.
“I’m not leaving,” she said when she saw my face. “It’s for the hospital.”
The suitcase was smaller than the blue one she had brought when she arrived. It stood beside her foot, patterned with little white stars. She looked as if she had been standing for too long.
“Do you want to sit?”
“If you don’t mind.”
I moved a box from the chair. She came in slowly and sat with a sigh she seemed embarrassed to have made.
“Mum’s car won’t start. Richard’s on his way back, but he isn’t answering. I’m not in labor,” she added quickly. “I just wondered whether you knew where he keeps the number for the garage.”
I did know. Of course I knew. The information had lived in my phone for years.
I sent it to her without comment.
“Thank you.”
She looked around the flat. There were boxes everywhere now. The chest from the nursery stood beside the bed, its drawers tied shut with cotton tape. The cardigan box rested on top.
“You’re almost ready.”
“Almost.”
“Have you found somewhere to live?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Near the market.”
“That sounds nice.”
I nodded. It was nice. It was also frightening in the way a place became frightening when there was nobody else to blame for choosing it.
Iris put the phone in her lap.
“I’m going to Mum’s after the birth. For a while.”
I looked at her.
“Does Richard know?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
She gave a tired smile. “That it wasn’t what we’d agreed.”
I almost answered too quickly. Instead I waited.
“I don’t know whether I want to stay with him,” she said. “I thought I had to decide before the baby came. As if there was a form I hadn’t filled in.”
“You don’t.”
“No. Mum keeps saying that.”
Her mother, I thought, was probably saying many things with impressive restraint.
“I haven’t suddenly become sensible,” Iris said. “I still want him to be the person I thought he was.”
The honesty made it difficult to remain remote.
“I know.”
She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw her understanding what the words cost.
“I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me.”
“Good.”
She smiled faintly. I did too, though neither of us was amused.
Outside, a delivery van passed along the lane. Iris shifted in the chair, one hand against her lower back.
“When I first came,” she said, “I thought you were going to make everything difficult on purpose.”
I laughed once. “I considered it.”
“I would have.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
She looked at the cardigan box. I waited, prepared to ask her not to.
Instead she said, “I’ll keep him out of your room. If he forgets.”
“He won’t. It’s empty now.”
The cot had gone two days earlier, collected by the organization I had contacted. I had watched it leave without feeling healed. I had felt relieved that I would not have to decide again tomorrow.
“Oh,” Iris said.
Her phone rang. It was her mother. She answered, listened, and began to laugh with relief.
“You left the lights on? Mum.”
She covered the phone and looked at me. “It’s the battery. Someone’s helping.”
“Good.”
When the call ended, she stood. I picked up the suitcase before she could reach for it and set it outside the door. She did not turn the gesture into an invitation to ask for more.
“Thank you,” she said.
I nodded.
At the gate she paused. “I hope the shop works.”
“So do I.”
She went back to the house. I closed the door and returned to the half-packed box beside the bed.
That evening Adam came with the measurements for the glass sections and a paper bag that smelled of cinnamon.
“From your future downstairs neighbor,” he said.
“You’ve been to the bakery?”
“I was passing.”
“Were you?”
“Near enough to make it sound plausible.”
We ate the buns sitting on the floor because the chairs were covered in labeled boxes. He looked at the room, then at me.
“You’ve done a lot.”
“Most of it is moving the same things from one box to another.”
He picked up a roll of tape. “An ancient tradition.”
I told him about Iris. He listened without turning her into a villain or asking me to forgive her. When I finished, he said, “That sounds difficult.”
“It was less difficult than I expected.”
“Those are good days.”
We labeled the kitchen things together. He had terrible handwriting for a man who produced beautiful drawings. I made him write CUPS twice before taking the pen away.
“They’ll work out what they are when they open it.”
“The object is not to open every box.”
“I see you’ve done this before.”
I stopped with the pen in my hand. I had, but always into someone else’s space, or with someone else’s plans already in place.
“Not quite like this.”
He looked at me. Then he took a clean label and wrote, carefully, ELENA’S CUPS.
“Better?”
“Possessive.”
“Accurate.”
I put the label on the box.
Before he left, I unhooked the spare bakery-flat key from my ring and held it out.
“For Thursday,” I said. “If you arrive before me.”
He closed his hand around it, then kissed me.
“I’ll be there.”