The lettering came off the showroom window in pieces. Nora had expected someone to peel it away cleanly, the name leaving as a whole. The man hired to do it used a scraper, working at the edges until small white fragments fell into a tray.
She stood on the pavement with the keys in her hand. She had come to surrender them and collect what she was permitted to take, after the evidence work and the ordinary business arrangements had been dealt with. The green-ring storage key had gone to the police. The front-door keys still looked like an invitation to a room she could enter and change.
The property agent waited beside her. He was kind in a limited, practiced way, not asking for explanations which had already been supplied by other people. Nora had liked to imagine dealing with the end herself; it had taken advice, meetings, bills and weeks in which she could not make a room decide anything.
The remaining stolen proceeds had been accounted for through the legal process. There were losses and payments still being resolved, and her own case continued. She had brought a folder of papers the agent needed and a bag for the few things she could take.
The showroom had never properly opened. The agent checked a page in her folder and asked her to sign.
Inside, the display wall remained. Someone else might use it. The thought hurt more than she expected. The work was good, and the light had been chosen exactly; another person could inherit the room without knowing how much of her had wanted it.
She collected the yellow bowl. It had been bought before the theft with money she'd earned. Even that distinction did not make it feel innocent in her hand. She had used it to make stolen spending look like taste.
The agent asked whether she needed a bag. Nora said she had one. Her arm was better now, not entirely comfortable under strain, but capable of small ordinary work. She carried the bowl herself.
At the door she gave him the keys. She did not turn back to check whether he'd locked it. The room was no longer hers to secure.
By the time the leaves began to fall in the yard of her new workplace, Nora had a bench she rented by the month in another person's restoration business.
The enterprise belonged to a woman named Sian, who had employed people long enough to dislike vague arrangements. She gave Nora paid work, a space for her own small jobs and a list of things not to leave on the floor. She knew there was a case and asked what Nora needed to tell her about availability and payments. Nora answered without inventing an investor or a period of bad luck.
Sian was not there to admire her recovery. She wanted a pair of chairs finished before a client moved house and a table repaired without turning it into a different table. Nora found the second instruction harder than the first.
“The legs would look better darker,” she said one afternoon.
Sian looked at the table. “Does the owner want them darker?”
“The owner wants it better.”
“She wants the split repaired.”
Nora ran her hand over the surface. The grain caught the light beautifully except where years of use had made it uneven. She could make it a better object, in her own opinion, with more than the agreed repair.
“I'll ask her,” she said.
“You can. Don't do it while you wait.”
Nora made a face. Sian smiled without yielding, then went back to her own bench.
The owner didn't want the change. She said the table looked like her parents' kitchen and that was why she'd kept it. Nora repaired the split, cleaned where it needed cleaning and left the colour alone. When the woman collected it, she put her hand on the top in a way which made Nora understand the work had succeeded without becoming what Nora would have chosen.
There were jobs she wanted to refuse because they were small, badly described or accompanied by an assertion that a little thing shouldn't cost much. She refused some. She took others because rent was due and she was good at them. Ambition did not become less troublesome when there was no showroom in which to arrange it.
Mina came once to look at a repair Sian wanted help with. Nora heard her voice at the entrance and turned too quickly, scraping the edge of her work against the bench.
“Careful,” Mina said.
“It isn't finished.”
“That's why you're supposed to be careful.”
They smiled, briefly. Mina looked around the workshop, noting the light, the tools and the shelves without offering a verdict on whether it was enough for Nora.
“You've got a window,” she said.
“I fought for it.”
“Of course you did.”
Mina's business had continued. The woman who'd come into the showroom from the street ordered a cabinet eventually; Mina had told Nora in an email which also set out the remaining costs they needed to resolve. Nora had been pleased and jealous, both at once, and had replied without making either feeling Mina's problem.
They discussed the repair. Mina pointed out a joint Nora had overlooked. Nora showed her a simpler way to match a missing section. For ten minutes they were two women looking at work, enjoying the other one's skill. Then Mina had to go.
“Coffee next week?” Nora asked.
Mina checked her phone.
“I'll see how the week goes.”
It wasn't yes. Nora let it remain what it was.
Cal was alive. The criminal proceedings took time. Contact, when it was permitted and possible, did not become a route for them to settle the facts between themselves. Nora heard his anger, fear, attempts to explain. Sometimes she heard something ordinary: a complaint about food, a memory of their old flat, a question about her arm. She could still miss him so much that a mundane sentence hurt.
She did not promise to restore the business or change the account. He did not become a stranger because keeping him a brother was difficult.
One evening, after a legal appointment which left her tired and afraid of the next one, Nora took the yellow bowl out of the cupboard beneath her workbench. She had been keeping it there because putting it where she could see it seemed vain. She set it on a shelf instead and put a handful of useful screws inside.
Sian walked past, looked at it and said, “Don't leave those where they can tip into somebody's work.”
Nora moved it farther back. It still caught the light. She was pleased with it, even with screws in the middle, even in a room she rented from someone who could tell her where things had to go.