Six weeks later, Leah still had to lift one corner of the wardrobe door before it would close.
She did it with her hip while holding a brush between her teeth. There was paint on her thumb and a small hole in the sleeve of her T-shirt. She had meant to change before Anna arrived.
The bell rang downstairs.
Leah took the brush from her mouth and set it in a jar. She wiped her thumb on the ruined sleeve, then went down the narrow stairs.
Anna stood outside holding a small paper bag.
‘I brought those earrings you accused me of stealing when you were twenty,’ she said.
Leah took the bag. ‘You did steal them.’
‘I borrowed them without permission. Very different.’
They looked at each other. Anna's smile faltered slightly.
Leah opened the bag. The earrings were there, wrapped in tissue. Anna had also put in the missing clasp for a necklace Leah had forgotten about.
‘Thank you,’ Leah said. ‘Come up.’
She had invited Anna three days earlier. A cup of tea, an hour if she wanted. Her sister had said yes without asking whether they could talk about the past first.
They had exchanged small messages since the move. A photograph of Anna's window finally open. A picture of lettering Leah was pleased with. Once, Anna had written that she missed Daniel and still knew she had wanted to go. Leah had not known what to say, so she had said exactly that.
Now Anna climbed the stairs behind her.
‘You weren't joking about these.’
‘Wait until you carry a painting box.’
The room was warmer than the passage. Leah had put her lamp on the little table and hung one picture with an adhesive strip after discovering what happened when she tried a nail in the wrong wall. The failed hole was hidden by a postcard.
Her bedcover did not match the curtains. The view still featured bins. On the windowsill there was a pot with a plant she had bought herself and was trying not to kill.
Anna stood inside the door. ‘It looks like you.’
‘It looks like I haven't finished.’
‘That too.’
Leah smiled and moved a box off the chair. Anna sat while Leah made tea in the shared kitchen. Down the corridor, someone had music playing softly. A bag of laundry waited outside another room. There was nothing about the building that required Leah to know who would love whom tomorrow.
When she came back, Anna was looking at the sign propped against the wall.
‘Is that for the shop on the corner?’
‘Yes. I have to finish the border.’
‘It's good.’
Leah put the mugs down. ‘I like it.’
She did. Work had become work again. The returned £2,400 had paid the deposit and helped her move without asking Ruth for money. There had been no wedding, no new date. Owen had cancelled what he booked and sent the remaining details she needed in a brief message. She had thanked him. Neither had used it to begin another conversation.
Sometimes she still woke wanting to tell him something funny. A man on a bicycle carrying a huge fern had nearly made her reach for her phone last week. She had stood in the street with the story ready, then kept it for Mira. Mira had laughed in a different place, at a different part. Leah was learning how that felt.
Anna took a sip of tea.
‘Mum called me yesterday,’ she said.
Leah sat on the bed. ‘How was it?’
‘She wants us at hers on Sunday. She said Daniel might come if we all asked him.’
‘Did you ask?’
‘No. He told her he had other plans.’
Leah nodded. Daniel had sent a photograph of a sketch once, after she asked how he was doing. He had written that he was using the front room again. There had been no invitation beneath it.
‘I've said I'm not coming this Sunday,’ Anna added. ‘I have a rehearsal, and I want to be there.’
Leah looked at her sister. Anna did not make the choice sound heroic. She sounded like a woman with somewhere she wanted to go.
‘I'm seeing Mum on Tuesday,’ Leah said. ‘At her flat. Just for a little while.’
‘All right.’
It was enough. Neither needed the other's decision to make her own acceptable.
They talked about the earrings, then about a costume Anna had made entirely the wrong shade under stage lights. Leah showed her the sign border. Anna suggested a line that would be quicker. Leah looked at it and chose a different one.
Her sister watched her make the first pencil mark.
‘That works,’ she said.
Leah believed her. She also knew she would have kept it if Anna hadn't liked it.
After an hour Anna stood. She had somewhere else to go. Leah walked downstairs with her.
At the door her sister said, ‘Could we do this again?’
‘Yes. Next week, perhaps.’
Anna nodded. She did not ask for a larger promise. Leah hugged her, a little less awkwardly than at the taxi, and let her leave.
Upstairs, her phone was ringing. Mira's name filled the screen.
‘Please tell me you've started getting ready,’ Mira said.
Leah looked at her painted thumb. ‘I've started thinking about it.’
‘Terrible answer. I'm at the bottom of your stairs in twenty minutes. Wear the orange jacket. It's cold, but vanity will sustain you.’
Leah changed her T-shirt. She put on the earrings Anna had brought and found the shoes she could dance in for more than two songs. The jacket needed a button sewn more firmly, but it would last the evening.
She looked at herself in the little mirror over the table. There was a smudge of paint beside her jaw. She rubbed it off, then stopped inspecting.
Mira arrived late and called from downstairs instead of climbing up. Leah locked the room and put the key in her pocket.
‘You look good,’ Mira said. ‘Did Anna leave the earrings?’
‘She brought them back.’
‘Only nine years to return a borrowed pair. Very efficient.’
Leah laughed. Mira took her arm and they walked towards the bus stop, talking over each other about which songs they hoped to hear.
At the dance floor Leah lost Mira for half a song. She kept dancing. A woman beside her moved to give her room, and Leah smiled at her without needing to become anything more than another woman out on a Saturday night.
Then Mira reappeared, waving both arms at exactly the wrong part of the music. Leah caught her hand and spun beneath it. The earrings brushed her neck. She was laughing before she completed the turn.
She would go home to the narrow stairs, the awkward wardrobe and the sign she had not quite finished. For now the next song was beginning, and she wanted it.