I woke before him and lay still, watching the pale light move along the wall. My own room. His arm across the space between us. The words from the previous evening still real in daylight.
He stirred when I touched his hand.
“Good morning,” he said.
“I love you.”
His eyes opened properly.
“I was checking,” I said.
He smiled, slow and sleepy.
“Still here.”
I kissed him, then got up because Nina and Ruth were collecting the wedding containers and I had work to do.
They returned from the venue with the hired pieces counted, the client’s flowers left as agreed and one slice of cake wrapped in a napkin for each of us. Finn had insisted, apparently. There had been enough pudding after all.
We ate the cake from the tops of the empty boxes while Ruth closed the job sheet. Every return item was there. The hours matched what we’d allowed. Nina attached the final photographs to the record and sent Sophie a message thanking her for the permission to use them in our portfolio.
The wedding was finished. Properly finished, including the part nobody photographed.
On the twenty-seventh, our last day taking orders at the estate, a customer arrived ten minutes before closing and asked for something cheerful for a friend who had passed an exam.
I could have been annoyed. Instead I chose the brightest stems left and made a small, ridiculous bouquet with a yellow ribbon Nina found at the bottom of a drawer.
“Too much?” she asked, holding it up.
“Yes,” I said. “Use it.”
The customer loved it. She paid, carried it away and left the door open long enough for a breeze to move through the room.
Ruth turned the sign.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Nina said, “I’ve brought something,” and retrieved a bottle of sparkling apple juice from the cold store. Ruth found three glasses that did not match. I put the scissors down on the bench and watched Nina struggle with the cap until she handed it to Ruth without embarrassment.
We stood where Mum had once called the place a palace. The workbenches were scarred. The support still occupied the restricted end. The buckets waiting for the move were stacked in the order Ruth wanted them loaded.
“To the new place,” Nina said.
“To being able to hear the doorbell,” Ruth added.
I lifted my glass.
“To everybody getting paid.”
They laughed, and we drank.
I wanted to tell them more. How much I loved them. How frightened I’d been. How the room contained Mum and didn’t contain her, how leaving was going to hurt even though I was looking forward to it. They knew some of that. The rest could wait until it belonged in a conversation instead of a speech.
Ruth touched her glass against mine once more.
“Your mother’s van was worse than ours,” she said.
“Much worse.”
“She’d have liked the bell.”
I nodded because I couldn’t quite answer.
We finished the juice and washed the glasses. Then Ruth left at the time on her rota, and Nina took the last photographs for the moving record.
My phone vibrated while I was checking the doors.
Richard.
For a moment my whole body braced, expecting another request.
The message was short. Iris had had the baby that afternoon. Both were well. Maya was with her; Richard was there too. He would confirm the agreed key handover through Harriet, and I did not need to alter anything.
There was a photograph attached. I did not open it immediately.
I sat on the stool by the bench and looked at the words both well. The baby existed. Somewhere beyond my view, there was a whole new person, innocent of the way the adults had arrived at this day.
I was glad they were well.
I was sad enough that the room blurred.
Both things remained true while I put the phone down and breathed until I could stand.
I sent a reply wishing Iris and the baby well. No offer. No question that would turn into a task. Then I called Adam.
“Can we walk tonight?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I don’t want to talk much.”
“We can walk.”
I locked the conservatory and took the long path round to the annex, where the last small boxes waited. Tomorrow would contain lorries, names on tape and decisions about what could travel.
Tonight I was going home to change my shoes, and then someone I loved would meet me outside.
The Glass We Chose
The first bolt came out looking much smaller than the job it had been doing.
Adam held it between finger and thumb, examined the threads and put it in a labelled tray. Behind him, one of his team steadied the arch while another checked the temporary support around the work area. The flowers had gone. The floor was protected. Our benches stood against the far wall, stripped of everything except the marks we had left on them.
Without ivy over its joints, Mum’s arch looked like something made by people. I could see where one edge had been planed badly, where paint had filled a gap, where the little wooden cap I knew so well had concealed a practical compromise.
“Here?” Adam asked.
I nodded.
He loosened the next fastening. The curve above us shifted almost imperceptibly, then settled into the hands waiting for it. I had expected a dramatic separation. Instead there were quiet instructions, a lift, the scrape of an old joint releasing. The top came down onto padded trestles.
I pressed my fingers against my mouth.
Adam glanced at me. I lowered my hand.
“I’m all right.”
He nodded and went back to the work.
I stayed clear while they wrapped the first piece. Nina was at the station yard with Ruth, receiving the cold store and the workbenches as the movers brought them across. I could hear their progress through the messages on my phone: the cabinet was in; the sink worked; the electrician had tested the bell again and Ruth now wished he would stop.
At the estate, the next piece of the arch came away. Its absence made an unexpected window through the room. I could see the patch of wall behind it, pale where the paint had been protected.
Then they began on the right-hand panel.
It had looked worse than the other in the survey photographs. We knew it needed attention. I had allowed for repairs, though allowing for something in a budget had not prepared me to hear the lower joint crumble when the covering strip was lifted.
Adam stopped the work.
He crouched beside it, examined the exposed timber and called me over.
“This lower frame isn’t going to hold when it’s lifted.”
I looked at the dark, broken edge.
“Can you put something behind it?”
“We can support it to remove it. Reusing it as a standing panel is another question.”
The decorative centre was tired too. Old repairs crossed beneath the paint. It had been good enough to remain where it was, held by adjoining pieces, and might not survive the attempt to become independent.
“What would it need?”
“More replacement than original. Time to make and fit a new frame, and there may be other damage once it’s apart.”
I stood back.
The other panel lay wrapped beside the arch. It had travelled through the inspection and lifting with less difficulty. There would be an arch, one old panel and a gap on the other side where I had pictured its pair.
“How long?” I asked.
“For a careful rebuild? I wouldn’t promise it for Monday.”
I could hear my own answer waiting: then we’ll wait. We’d begun with a whole building, and I could still feel the old urge to delay everything until the pieces matched what I remembered.
I took out my phone and looked at the photograph of the station wall.
The arch stood in my imagination between the workroom and the display space. Its left side needed the old panel to keep customers from seeing the practical clutter beyond it. The right side needed a surface, not an heirloom. We could make a plain one. Paint it. Put flowers in front of it without pretending the paint had been there for eighty years.
“A new panel,” I said. “Simple. The same height, not a copy.”
Adam looked at the photograph with me.
“That can be done.”
“In the blue we’ve chosen for the door.”
He studied it. “That would work.”
“I don’t want someone to make cracks in it so it looks old.”
“No.”
“Let it be new.”
He wrote down the change and the cost. We took out the allowance for the uncertain repair and added the plain replacement. I checked the difference against the remaining fit-out money, then agreed. It was a smaller decision than restoring the whole room and still required me to mean it.
The damaged panel came down supported, revealing more of the poor frame. I looked at it once before the team moved it away with the material that could not be reused.
I kept the arch and the panel that could travel.
By lunchtime they were on the vehicle, protected and secured. I watched the straps being checked, then went to the annex to collect my own last boxes while the team finished making the site tidy.
The room was nearly bare.
My clothes had gone to the flat the previous evening. The little table held only my keys, a cleaning cloth and the brass bowl. In the drawer were the ring box and the Cornwall photograph. I put both into the box of personal papers, without turning the photograph over.
The small LATER box waited beneath the bed.
I drew it out, held it against me and carried it to the car myself. The label had begun to peel at one corner. I pressed it down with my thumb.
There was room for it on the bedroom cupboard’s upper shelf at the flat. Room enough that I wouldn’t have to put shoes on top of it or move it every time I wanted a towel. I set it there when I arrived, alongside the smaller family photograph box. I could reach it easily.
Then I carried the brass bowl into the kitchen and put three apples in it.
At the station yard, the arch was arriving.
Nina stood in the doorway with a clipboard and a smear of blue paint on one wrist. Ruth was directing the last workbench into place. The cold store hummed in the back room. Someone had opened the front window, and the place smelled of fresh timber, soap and the first bucket of flowers.
Adam’s team brought in the arch pieces, one at a time. I followed the curved top with my eyes as it crossed the threshold. There was clearance above it. We had measured; it was still a relief to see the actual thing fit.
“Where’s the other panel?” Nina asked.
“It couldn’t be reused safely. We’re putting a new one there.”
She looked at the gap, then at the paint on her wrist.
“Blue?”
“Yes.”
She considered it. “I like that.”
I did too, suddenly and without having to persuade myself.
The next day was all small noises.
Screws turning. A saw outside. Ruth moving a crate across the floor. Nina opening and closing cupboards to decide where ribbon belonged. I scrubbed the old workbench until the surface was clean and its stains remained, which was the best any of us could reasonably expect.
Adam fitted the arch with his colleague. The crooked wooden caps went back over the fastenings. One still needed its little shim, replaced with something more durable than Mum’s original folded cardboard. He showed me before he closed it.
“Very rustic,” I said.
He smiled. “I’m preserving the important features.”
The sound panel stood on one side. On the other, the new blue surface was clean and plain. Together they gave the front room a shape I hadn’t been able to see when it was empty. Through the arch I could glimpse the place where Nina would work, a ribbon rack and the bright steel edge of the sink.
It wasn’t the conservatory.
I walked through it, turned and came back.
“What?” Adam asked.
“Nothing. I’m trying it.”
He moved aside. I went through again, carrying a bucket this time.
“That’s a more convincing test.”
“Don’t encourage me. I’ll get the trolley.”
When the fitting was done, we checked the finish and the agreed work against his list. He explained the care of the repaired parts, showed Ruth and me the new fixing points and sent the completion note. The invoice would come through the business, as the rest of his work had.
He packed his tools into the car.
I watched him close the boot, then came outside.
“Are you finished?”
“With this job, yes.”
“Good. Would you like to come and have tea in my shop?”
His expression changed, just a little.
“I’d like that.”
Inside, Ruth had already made it. She handed him a mug and told him not to put it on the newly painted panel. Nina laughed from beneath the desk, where she was looking for a cable she’d dropped.
We stood around the workbench drinking tea while the room settled into itself. A train passed beyond the yard. The bell rang because the repair-shop owner had come to see whether we needed anything before he closed.
“Just looking,” he said.
“You’re our first browser,” Nina told him.
He examined the flowers, bought a small bunch for his wife and insisted on paying even when I began to say we weren’t officially open. Ruth found the card reader. It worked.
After he left, she put the receipt beside the diary.
“Promising,” she said.
“One bunch,” I reminded her.
“One paid bunch.”
On Sunday afternoon I went back to the estate for the last time as someone with keys.
The annex was clean. The cupboard doors stood open. The rose still pressed at the bathroom window, indifferent to who occupied the room. I took the last small bag of rubbish outside and closed the door.
The conservatory was empty of our things.
I had walked into it so often carrying something that I almost looked round for the bucket I’d forgotten. The support remained at the far end. A pale line on the floor showed where our oldest bench had stood. Without the arch, the room was longer and less familiar.
I went to the place by the yard doors where Adam and I had eaten our first sandwiches.
There was nothing there now. No table, no chair, no paper with crumbs caught in its folds. I could still remember the weight of my anger that morning, the humiliation of being corrected about a building I loved, and the surprise of laughing before lunch was over.
I walked to the patch where Mum’s bench had been.
For a moment I could hear her telling me not to cut a stem that short. I had no idea whether she had ever said it in this exact place. She had said it often enough elsewhere.
“I know,” I said aloud.
The room gave the words back faintly.
I stood there until I was ready to move. Then I switched off the light beside the door, although the afternoon hardly needed it, and locked up.
Richard met me by the yard gate at the agreed time. He looked tired in the ordinary way of someone whose nights had changed. There was no coffee, no suggestion that we should sit down.
I handed him the keys.
“The annex and the workroom. The yard key’s the longer one.”
“I know.”
“Yes.”
We both looked at the small ring of metal in his hand.
“Everything out?” he asked.
“Everything on the agreed list. Harriet has the completion photographs.”
“All right.”
A bird moved in the hedge behind him. From the house came a faint sound I could not identify and chose not to.
“Goodbye, Richard.”
He looked at me then.
“Goodbye, Elena.”
I walked to my car. Adam waited in the passenger seat because I had asked him to come, and because I had asked to do this part alone.
He did not get out when I reached it. He simply opened the window and looked at me.
“Ready?”
I put my hand on the door for a moment, feeling the sun-warmed metal beneath my palm.
“Yes.”
I drove us through the gate.
At the lane, I had to wait for a tractor. It took its time, carrying something enormous and muddy that I couldn’t name. Adam watched it pass with exaggerated patience.
“Grand exit,” he said.
I began to laugh. There were tears in it, and he took my hand while we waited.
When the road was clear, I turned towards town.