Leah had put the wrong things in the first bag. When the strap broke on Anna's front step, three pairs of shoes and the little satin purse she had bought for her wedding fell onto the gravel.
She stood looking at them. Behind her, the taxi pulled away.
The door opened before she could bend down.
‘Leave it,’ Daniel said. ‘I've got them.’
He gathered the shoes against his chest. He picked up the purse by its silver chain without asking why she had brought it.
Leah took the torn bag from him. ‘A very elegant entrance.’
‘The doorbell's broken. It saved you knocking.’
There was blue paint on one of his fingers. She watched him tuck the purse among the shoes and wondered, absurdly, whether it would stain. She had used the purse once, standing in front of a mirror while Owen pretended to introduce her as the world's least frightening jewel thief. He had put his hand at her waist and turned her round. She had laughed so hard she had lost an earring.
That had been less than a month ago.
‘Leah?’ Daniel said.
She stepped inside.
The hall still had the tall mirror from her childhood, although Anna had painted its frame green. There was a bowl for keys where her father had kept a tin of shoe polish. Under the stairs sat a pair of enormous black boots with curled toes.
‘They're not mine,’ Daniel said, following her gaze.
‘I didn't like to ask.’
‘Anna's got a pirate to dress.’
‘A pirate?’ Anna called from upstairs. ‘It's a baron. This is why nobody asks you to theatre quizzes.’
She came down carrying a velvet coat, one arm pushed through a sleeve. Her hair was pinned up with two pencils. She let the coat trail on the stairs and hugged Leah so hard that one of the pencils caught her cheek.
‘Sorry. Don't move. I'll stab you again.’
Leah held on. Anna smelt of the hairspray she had always used before a show. It was easier to close her eyes against that familiar shoulder than to look at the purse in Daniel's hands.
‘You're here now,’ Anna said.
Something in Leah gave way at those words. She had managed the taxi and the bags and the last trip through the flat without crying. She had even left a note saying the rent was paid until the end of the month, though she did not know whether Owen would come back to read it.
Now she cried on Anna's velvet coat.
‘Oh, love.’ Anna drew her further into the hall. ‘Come on. Shoes can wait.’
Daniel went upstairs with the bags. He had brought her two boxes over in his car before she arrived and put them in the garage. He did not offer a solution from halfway up.
Eight days earlier, Owen had gone before Leah came home from work. At first she had thought he had taken an overnight job or gone to visit someone. His smaller suitcase was missing. So was his jacket. She had called, then called again, standing beside the bed they had chosen together.
His answer had come as a text.
Yes. I've chosen to go. I've let you down. Don't wait for me.
When she asked where he was, he told her he was taking a room in Bristol. When she asked what he meant by not waiting, he had not answered.
There had been no fight that morning. He had kissed the side of her neck while she searched for a clean T-shirt. She remembered being mildly annoyed because he knew kissing her there made it difficult to leave.
She could not make the two things belong to the same man.
Anna got her as far as the sitting room. The old piano was gone, replaced by a low bookcase. Through the window Leah could see the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. Her father had once let a climbing plant grow so thick across its door that he had to enter sideways for an entire summer.
‘I can still go to Mira's,’ Leah said. ‘If this is too much.’
‘It isn't.’
‘She said the sofa's free until her cousin visits. I wouldn't be stuck.’
‘You aren't stuck here either.’ Anna took the coat off her shoulder and laid it over a chair. ‘Stay because you want to.’
Leah had wanted to. When Ruth suggested Anna's house, she had pictured a room with a door she could close and people who would know when to knock. Mira would be kind, but Mira's flat was small and full of noise. Leah had wanted this garden. She had wanted her sister.
Daniel came back down with the satin purse.
‘I wasn't sure where this should go.’
‘In a bin,’ Leah said.
He looked at her, then placed it beside her bag instead. ‘You can decide later.’
She was grateful and cross with him at once. It was her sister's husband saying the sensible thing. She had been so certain she would soon have a husband of her own.
‘I've put you in the front room,’ he said. ‘The blind doesn't quite reach the bottom of the window. There's a heavier curtain in the wardrobe if the light bothers you.’
‘It won't.’
‘And I found that print you liked.’
Leah looked up. ‘The dancers?’
‘Yes. Anna put it away when she changed the room.’
It was a cheap poster of a crowded dance floor, with two women laughing in the foreground. Leah had admired it at a street market years ago. Daniel had bought it for the spare room, and every time she slept here she noticed a different face in the crowd.
‘You remembered that?’
‘You always stand in front of it.’
He said it easily, as though paying attention did not require an occasion.
Anna picked up her coat. ‘Before we make him unbearable, can you both carry a trunk? Only to the dining room. I said I'd sort the costumes at home and then discovered home didn't have twice as much floor as the theatre.’
There were two trunks in the upstairs passage. Daniel took the larger one. Anna and Leah carried the other between them, awkwardly, with Leah walking backwards.
‘Step,’ Anna said. ‘Another. Stop. Your end's going first.’
‘My end always went first.’
‘Your end was lighter.’
‘You said I was stronger.’
‘And you believed me. Years of successful management.’
For a moment they were girls again, smuggling a battered dressmaker's dummy into their bedroom and trying to convince their father it had always been there. Leah laughed before she remembered she was supposed to feel dreadful.
In the dining room, Anna opened the trunk. A tangle of lace rose from it. She fished out a cream jacket and held it against Leah.
‘That's almost right. Can I borrow you for five minutes?’
Leah let her put it on. The lining caught on her wrist. Anna unpicked a loose thread with the point of a pin and began talking about a performer who kept claiming his arms had grown since the fitting.
Leah looked at the pin between her sister's fingers.
‘You collected my wedding outfit that Monday.’
Anna stopped talking.
‘From the flat,’ Leah said. ‘Was Owen there?’
‘For a bit.’
‘Did he tell you why he was going?’
Anna lowered the jacket's lapel. ‘Why would he tell me?’
‘Because you saw him. I don't know who else he saw. I don't even know what happened.’ Leah pulled her wrist free of the lining. ‘Did you two talk about him leaving me? About us?’
Anna's eyes moved to the open trunk. She pressed the lapel flat with her palm.
‘He abandoned you,’ she said. ‘That's what happened. We didn't talk about that.’
Leah took a breath. She hated how much she had wanted Anna to say yes. Any answer might have made that empty flat seem less impossible.
‘So he just went.’
‘He chose it.’
Anna sounded certain. Leah let the certainty hold her for a moment. Owen's text said the same thing, after all. He had chosen to go. He had told her not to wait.
She put the jacket on the table.
‘I keep thinking of things I could have said that morning.’
Anna caught her hand. ‘You don't have to find the sentence that would have made him stay.’
Leah nodded. She wanted to believe that too.
‘Show me the man with the growing arms,’ she said. ‘Before I start again.’
Anna reached into the trunk. This time she brought out a red coat with only one sleeve attached.
‘You see the problem.’
Leah sat down and took the sleeve. Daniel left them the room, closing the door softly behind him. By the time Anna had found the right thread, Leah had stopped crying.