The car took her out of London while the light was still strong enough to make the showroom windows she passed look promising. Nora kept seeing other people's rooms: a cafe whose chairs were too large for its tables, a hairdresser with an unexpectedly beautiful floor, an empty shop already covered in a sign for what it would become.
She had spent years believing she could see something in a space before anyone else. Now every half-finished place seemed like a person who had got there before her.
The driver asked whether she was going home.
“Work,” Nora said.
He nodded. She was grateful he didn't ask what sort. She sat with her arm supported by her coat, careful not to let the seat belt rub the dressing. The pain had become less sharp during the week, but fatigue brought it back in ways she resented. She could not plan a day as if the arm would forgive whatever the rest of her wanted.
Her phone rang. Cal. She let it ring once more before answering.
“Where are you?”
“Out.”
“I've been to the showroom.”
“I left.”
“I can see that.”
She looked at the side window. The road widened; buildings thinned into warehouses and open stretches of land.
“I needed to do things.”
“What things?”
“Cal.”
He breathed out. She knew the sound so well she could almost see the posture that went with it, head lowered, a hand against the back of his neck.
“Fine. Ring me later.”
“I will.”
She did not say where she was going. He did not know from the call, or from the fact he'd found the showroom empty. Nora kept the phone in her lap until the screen went dark.
There was a message from her solicitor about the records he needed. She replied that she would send what she had that evening, then opened the delivery firm's instructions. Piece, dimensions, access. She had the dimensions. The rest would have to be seen.
The storage building stood in a small yard behind units used by several trades. It was cold even when the rest of the yard was working; Cal paid the man who leased the larger building for this separate locked space. No company sign, no workbench in daily use. Across the yard a trade counter was still open, its door propped with a bucket of fixings. He had wanted somewhere his van's contents could remain between jobs, and Nora's pieces had begun to fill every corner of her apartment. She'd come here before they moved everything to the showroom, chosen where the bench should go, insisted on blankets between wood and metal. The place had been ugly but useful, a room for work before work became something other people saw.
The driver stopped near the entrance. Nora had arranged a return later, leaving time to look through the pieces without pretending she could carry them herself.
“I'll wait over there if I'm early,” he said, pointing toward the road beyond the yard.
“Thank you.”
She got out slowly. The cold air touched the skin above her dressing. She pulled her coat around herself and waited until the car moved off before going to the unit.
The nearest doors were shut. A man farther along the yard was loading a wheelbarrow into a van. He looked up when she stopped at Cal's door.
“You're with the one in there?”
“My brother.”
“Tell him the landlord's had complaints. Whatever he's left at the back wants looking at.”
He shut his van before she could ask more. Nora could smell damp concrete and petrol from here. She took a photograph from the yard so the movers would know which door to approach. She kept her coat fastened, the phone in her right hand, the key awkward between two fingers while she tried to put it away.
The green-ring key fitted. Nora turned it and lifted the latch with her good hand. The separate outside hasp hung open, its padlock hole empty. The door stuck at the bottom; she remembered that from before. She pushed with her shoulder, keeping the injured arm clear, until it gave.
Inside, the light switch was where it had always been. The strip light flickered once, then settled. For a moment she saw only work.
Boards along the wall. Two chairs awaiting repair. Boxes of fittings. Her elm bench on its end, padded with an old quilt. She knew it by the legs she'd made, darker than the worn top, which she had argued with herself about changing and then left.
Nora went straight to it. The quilt had come loose at one corner, exposing the darker leg she'd made. She ran a finger along the edge. Smooth, even here, where no client would think to look unless she invited them.
She'd worked on it before the theft, in the apartment, with the window open and her neighbours politely asking when the noise would stop. The top had been the reason she'd bought it. People had worn a shallow dip into the elm by sitting in the same place year after year. She wanted to keep that, and remove the ugly legs someone added when an earlier repair failed.
Cal said it wasn't a sensible thing to begin while she was trying to get the showroom ready. Then he brought the timber she wanted and held the top steady while she marked where the new legs would meet. They argued about the join, tried it her way, changed one thing his way and made a bench which looked inevitable when it was finished.
Nora touched the leg now. This was what she had wanted to come for: a piece she could put under a window and watch somebody choose to sit on. In Cal's van it would have been another thing she thanked him for bringing. Here, with the key in her pocket and the movers waiting for photographs, she could give somebody else instructions.
She drew the quilt back enough to show the side, then stopped when she felt the old tug in her arm. It would have to remain on its end. The firm could see what it was without her proving she could move it.
The first photograph made the bench look narrow and top-heavy. She stepped back, crouched carefully and took another from a lower angle. That showed the surface, the legs and the padding. She added a note about the repair underneath and asked them to protect the elm without taping anything directly to it.
There was a box beside the door. Empty, light enough to shift with her foot. She moved it out of the route and photographed the clear floor space. The yard picture went with it. Three images, a short instruction, enough for the man at the firm to know what his people would arrive to do.
She sent them. While the message was leaving, she opened the earlier conversation and read her cancellation from yesterday. Cal had been standing by the sample table then, Hannah putting her number on a card. Nora could hear herself saying he kept things properly. He had kept the bench properly. That did not answer Hannah's question about a folio.
She almost rang her brother to say she'd found it. It would be an ordinary call: here it is, I'm arranging the van, you needn't worry about the work. He would ask where she was, who'd gone with her, why she hadn't waited. She put the phone in her coat pocket instead.
The little wooden offcut beneath the bench was loose. Nora recognized it as one Cal used to stop the top rocking while he worked. She left it for the movers to see, added one more photograph and looked around for the rest of the quilt so she could cover the exposed edge before leaving.
Boards stood along the wall, some matching the shelf, some from other jobs. A box had a client's name on it in her brother's handwriting. There was the half-used protective roll she'd seen him cut that morning. She reached for the quilt's trailing corner, then paused.
The smell was wrong at the back of the unit.
At first she thought of something left wet. A blanket packed away, a leaking container, the old refrigerator Cal had once taken out of a client's kitchen and kept because he said the door could be useful. Nora looked for it. It wasn't here.
She stepped farther in. The smell grew heavier, clinging to the back of her throat. She pulled her scarf over her nose, then lowered it because she didn't want to make the room frightening before she knew what was in it.
Behind a tall cupboard, boards had been stacked across a narrow gap. Cal hadn't used to put them there. They blocked the place where Nora remembered a crate of handles.
She could leave the bench uncovered and ring him. Ask what he'd stored, say the unit smelled bad, let him come and make the thing practical. The choice was familiar enough that she almost took the phone out.
Instead she moved closer, holding the light of her phone low where the strip light did not reach.
There was a folded tarpaulin behind the boards. Beneath it, something was the wrong shape for the materials she knew.
Nora stopped. The smell reached her again, thick and sweet and appalling. She had a thought she didn't want, so sudden that her hand shook and the light moved away from the thing before she could properly see it.
She made herself put the light back.