The stair led to her first studio.
Elena stopped halfway up. Mirrors stood along the wall where the landing should have been. A strip of wooden floor extended beyond them, bright with morning light. Daniel knelt at its far end with a screw between his lips and a drill beside his knee.
She knew that room. They had spent a weekend clearing it, pulling old carpet from concrete, cleaning the marks where a tenant had smoked beside the window. She had been afraid nobody would come. Daniel had painted the door red because he said people would remember it even if they forgot her name.
He took the screw from his mouth. “Hold this straight for me.”
In front of Elena the banister had become the edge of a mirror. Her reflection wore her present clothes, soaked at the ankles, but Daniel looked as he had in the photograph. Miles was behind her, one step lower, gripping the rail with his good hand.
“Keep going,” he said.
“There's no landing.”
“There has to be.”
Daniel held the mirror upright. It began to tip. Elena reached to steady it before thinking. Her palm touched the cold glass, and a warmth spread under it: the day he made the studio possible, the room she had wanted for years. If she stayed with her hand there, he could finish. She would get to hear him say he was proud of her again.
Miles's shoulder struck her back. He had slipped on the wet step. She turned to catch him, taking her hand off the mirror.
The glass fell.
She heard it break all the way down the stair, but no fragments touched them. Daniel looked at her. He was no longer kneeling. He stood at the far end of the hall in his brown shirt.
“I made that for you,” he said.
She helped Miles onto the landing. “I know.”
“You don't have to throw it away.”
The studio vanished. They stood beside the bathroom. The blue door was farther along than Elena remembered, beyond a stretch of hallway now lined with familiar coats. Their home coats, the raincoat with the broken pocket, the jacket he wore on their last winter walk. She pushed them aside.
Behind the coats lay their kitchen at home. A table blocked the way. It was set for two, a glass of yellow-label wine beside each plate. Elena saw that and stopped. She had brought the wrong wine tonight. Daniel had not teased her about it. The house had supplied the one he liked.
He pulled out her chair.
“You can sit,” he said. “You're tired.”
Miles leaned against the wall. He was breathing hard. The towel around his hand had darkened, and his face was so pale she could scarcely distinguish it from the plaster.
Elena went to the table. She did not sit. She picked up the nearest glass and threw its wine against the wall, then pushed the table with both hands. It scraped, resisted, moved a few inches. She pushed again.
“What are you doing?” Daniel asked.
She turned it on its side. Plates and cutlery fell. The sound was hideously ordinary, a domestic row made louder by breaking crockery. She had never smashed anything during their arguments. For an instant she felt the old embarrassment, as if a neighbor might hear.
Miles came beside her and kicked the fallen chair clear with one foot. He could not lift things now. She could. She made space wide enough for him and put her body between him and Daniel.
“Don't look at him,” Miles said.
“I am looking.”
Daniel stood among the broken plates. His expression was one she remembered from the argument after she went rowing without him. Hurt, angry, certain that fear proved his case. She loved that face even now, loved the man who had worn it badly and then tried to make her laugh when he knew he had lost. She had no time left to decide what all of it meant.
She stepped around the table.
The blue door stood ahead. Water dripped from its handle onto a runner soaked through. Elena could hear the slow thudding behind it. She could feel the cold reaching for the air inside her chest.
Miles looked at the wall. “Is it here?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
She guided his good hand to the space beside the handle. To him it was still plaster. He touched it, then her wrist, checking where she stood.
Daniel came up behind them. Elena knew his step without turning.
“You won't remember me,” he said.
She closed her eyes. The hand on Miles's wrist was hers, warm enough to feel his pulse. She opened them again and put her other hand on the blue knob.
“I do now,” she said.
She turned it.