Somebody had painted the door green. Nina stood at the foot of the steps, looking at it while Adam came up the sidewalk behind her. He was carrying two coffees in a cardboard tray.
“I didn't know if you'd had anything,” he said.
She took one. It was too hot to hold without the sleeve. He'd ordered what she liked.
“Do you have a key?” she asked.
He looked at the green door. “Not now.”
“I meant when we lived here.”
“Of course I did.”
She tried to remember how they'd got the keys. A landlord who hadn't been available, Adam coming back with them, his pleasure in making the bad start to their house search turn out well. It was a little story attached to the bigger one. She'd never had a reason to keep the dates straight.
“Are we knocking?” he asked.
She went up the steps before he could offer another reason not to.
Through the narrow pane beside the door, she saw a figure approach. The man who opened it was about Adam's age, barefoot, with flour on one side of his dark trousers. He looked first at Nina, then past her.
“Adam.”
Adam smiled. It arrived so quickly that Nina felt she had missed a step.
“Hey. Sorry to turn up.”
“No, no. Come in.” The man pulled the door wider. “I thought you were next week.”
“We used to live here,” Nina said.
The man looked at her again. “Oh.”
“My wife,” Adam said. “Nina.”
“Of course. Come on in.”
He didn't say his name. Nina could have asked. Instead she crossed the threshold into a house that smelled of warm bread and new paint.
The hall mirror was the same. Not similar: the same narrow brown frame with a pale scrape at one corner where she'd caught it with a chair. The photographs around it were different. A man and a woman near water. The same pair in front of a low stone wall. Nothing she recognized.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
The man glanced at Adam. “Just getting settled.”
“Looks good,” Adam said. “You've done a lot.”
The man laughed, as though they shared a joke about who had actually done it. Adam put his coffee on the little hall shelf and took it off again immediately, remembering something. Nina had once sanded the shelf and left it tacky for a week. There was no reason it would still be tacky now.
She wanted that mistaken gesture to please her. It did, for a second.
“We rented upstairs,” she said. “The first year.”
“That's empty at the moment.”
Adam turned toward her. “We shouldn't take up his morning.”
“It's fine,” the man said. “Have a look. I'm just making a mess in the kitchen.”
The main stair had a runner now. Nina went up slowly, her hand on a rail she had once leaned across to drop Adam's forgotten wallet. The upper landing was brighter than she remembered. Someone had taken down the door that divided their old apartment from the stairs.
The room at the front contained a bed with a blue throw folded across its foot. There had been a desk under the window when they lived here, Nina's desk, so close to the radiator that the right side of her body had stayed warm while the left froze. She'd built shelves from boards she'd bought and sanded herself. The holes were filled now.
“Remember the winter?” Adam said behind her.
“Which part?”
“You wore gloves to type.”
“One glove.”
“You cut the fingers off it.”
“I was very resourceful.”
He smiled. She looked at the wall where the shelves had been. She had loved making them, even crooked. She hadn't made anything for years that didn't live on a screen.
There was a suitcase beside the wardrobe. Its luggage tag was blank. In the bathroom, two toothbrushes stood in a glass. Somebody had put a pair of reading glasses on a book near the bed. It was not quite an empty room, and not quite a room someone had left in a hurry. Every object seemed to know where it was meant to be.
“Guest things?” she asked.
“Probably.” Adam stood in the doorway. “We should go.”
“Why?”
“Because this is somebody's house.”
“He asked us in.”
Nina went to the little rear window. Below it lay the enclosed court where they used to put a rack of wet towels on good days. The walls still screened it from the street. A gate at the back had been repaired. Something white stood just inside it, wrapped in plastic.
Adam came beside her and put his hand against the sill.
“I always liked this window.”
She looked at him. “You always said it was a view of a wall.”
He laughed too loudly. From downstairs the man called that the bread wasn't ready but he could offer them something else.
“We'll get out of your way,” Adam called back.
Nina passed him and went downstairs.
In the kitchen the man was wiping flour from the counter into his hand. A chipped orange bowl stood beside the sink.
Nina stopped.
“We had one exactly like that.”
The man followed her gaze. “It's good, isn't it?”
“It was ours,” Adam said. “We left some things.”
Nina looked at him. “I thought you couldn't find it.”
“There was a lot going on.”
There had been boxes. His mother arriving to help, her father insisting he could carry more than he should, Nina wanting to be packed before people saw what she had failed to do. The bowl wasn't the only thing they'd lost.
“You want it?” the man asked.
“No,” Adam said as Nina said, “Could I?”
All three of them paused.
“Sorry,” Nina said. “It's silly.”
“It's not silly.” The man lifted the bowl. There was dough in it, covered with a cloth. “Let me get something to put this in.”
He turned to the cupboard. Nina reached for the bowl before he had quite set it down. On the far side of the kitchen, the edge of a folding display screen shifted in a draft. Behind it she could see the top of the service stair.
“Still use the laundry?” she asked.
“Down there? Yes.”
“We used to go that way when they painted the hall.”
“Nina,” Adam said.
She moved past the screen. It was light enough to rock when her bag brushed it. There was the narrow stair, the rail stopping short at the top where it always had. She went down two steps, holding the kitchen light behind her. At the foot she could see the old laundry sink and the service door, its bolt bright against the dull paint.
“We fixed that latch,” she said.
Adam was at the opening now. “I remember.”
“You held it backward for ten minutes and blamed the screws.”
“It worked eventually.”
She had laughed so hard she'd dropped the screwdriver. Then they'd had to find it in the basket of clothes waiting to go upstairs. A long, entirely useless afternoon they'd finished by walking out through that outward-opening door, up the few steps to the public lane, to buy the wrong size of screw.
She came back into the kitchen. The man was putting dough into a large saucepan.
“Please don't,” she said. “Keep it. I didn't mean to—”
“It's no trouble.”
“Really. I was just surprised.”
He looked at Adam, seeking a way to be hospitable that wouldn't make anything worse. Adam took the bowl from him and put the cloth back over it.
“We'll leave you to it.”
The man wiped his hands again. “Next week, then?”
“I'll call.”
“And tonight? The housewarming. Bring Nina.”
“We'll see,” Adam said.
The man smiled at her. “He knows where. You'd be very welcome.”
They went out through the front door. Nina carried her untouched coffee down the steps. In the lane beside the house a woman was dragging a trash can toward the street. Nothing was concealed there, only the turn of an ordinary end house and the side door below street level.
At the cars Adam asked, “What did you expect to find?”
Nina looked up at the room that had been theirs.
“You tell me.”
“It's a rental. People leave things.”
“He knows you. You're going back next week.”
“I work on properties. This is a property.”
His impatience arrived so unexpectedly that she felt relief. At least it was something he hadn't folded into a pleasant shape first.
“Then say that,” she said. “Instead of telling me a view of a wall was your favorite window.”
He looked at the house. Then at her coffee, as though remembering he'd brought it to make the morning better.
“I wanted you to remember something good.”
“I do remember good things.”
He didn't answer.
She opened her car. On the passenger seat the visitor pass had fallen out of her bag. She put it back in before Adam could ask about it.
“I've got to get back.”
“Lunch?”
“Work thing.”
She looked at him over the car door. “Come by, if you're free. It's only lunch.”
“Okay.”
He stepped aside. She drove away without touching the coffee. In the rearview mirror he was still looking at the green door.