Elena took her phone and opened the photographs.
Daniel stood beside the first studio with his spirit level. She remembered that day: he had put a mirror up crooked and refused to admit it until she made him stand on the far side of the room. She could hear his laugh, see the shirt he wore. The memory hurt in the usual way. She moved to a photograph from the first flat, Daniel at the kitchen table.
Nothing came.
She could identify his face. She knew the yellow cupboard behind him. The anniversary belonged there somewhere, but the photograph did not let her enter it. She stared until the screen dimmed.
Miles sat on the bottom stair. He had put the sweatshirt back on. His feet were bare. The red seam rested on one knee.
“One room,” Elena said.
He nodded.
“How much is in the rest?”
“I don't know.”
She looked at the sitting room. The fern paper had returned. Beyond it she could hear a radio, the tune she and Daniel had danced to in the little kitchen. The house could still play it. She could not remember his feet.
“It's keeping all of it,” she said. “Every time I came here. All the things he told it. All the things we—”
The last word would not come. She sat on the opposite end of the step from Miles. Neither looked at the other.
Daniel's account lay on the hall floor. Miles had read the first part again, the part about offering their shared life as the bond. She could see doors opening onto evenings she had once carried safely inside her.
Then the sitting room changed again. The floral sofa went dark, and beyond the fern paper she saw the kitchen table with two mugs and a torn crust on a plate. Her wet towel lay beside it. A woman in her wool trousers was turning a sweatshirt on the back of a chair.
Elena stood up. Miles turned too.
A second Miles reached for the sweatshirt in the held kitchen, and his hand met the woman's on the red cuff seam. Both hands stayed there. Elena could still feel that brief touch. She remembered letting go, and wishing afterward that she had not been so quick.
“That's tonight,” she said.
Miles moved nearer the doorway. The two figures did not look at him. Her remembered hand let go, and the woman turned away.
“It's got that already.” Elena reached for the real Miles's sleeve, stopping short of it. “If we burn it—”
He looked at her hand. “I don't know.”
She could still remember the orange chocolate she had described to him, the way he tasted it. That conversation had stayed when the old anniversary went. But the kitchen beyond the doorway held something else from tonight, waiting beside all the years she had brought here. She put her hand down.
Miles watched the two figures fade. Then he sat on the stair again, farther from her than before. She sat down too.
“If we burn the whole thing,” Miles said, “if we get into what he couldn't reach—”
“I know.”
“We might be able to get out.”
“And leave him here.”
Miles rubbed his eyes. “He isn't here.”
She turned toward him. “Don't.”
“Those rooms are. What you remember. He's dead.”
“You don't have to tell me that.”
“Then don't make me the man who takes him away from you.”
She stood up. “You came here to let it take me.”
“I did. I told you.” He rose too. “And then I pulled you out of the water. I still want you out. I want us both out.”
“Easy to say when it's my life we're burning.”
“Mine is in a white room upstairs.”
She looked at the stair. He stood between her and it, a living man with a temper and a pulse visible in his neck. In the guest room the sheet waited, clean and without a wrinkle.
“You took the money.”
“Yes.”
“He gave you eleven years.”
“And I used them. I want more.” His voice rose. “I want to know if Sana gets her mortgage. I want the shelf to come down on my head because I keep putting off fixing it. I want to be there when someone complains the toast is cold. I want to go outside without looking for water under my shoes.”
Elena had begun to cry. She was angry that he could see it. “I want my husband.”
“I know.”
“No, you don't.”
Miles looked away, and the look stopped her more effectively than an answer. There was something he had not told her. She was tired of things he had not told her. Yet she could not ask while her own words stood between them.
A hand touched her shoulder.
It was warm. She thought Miles had moved behind her and turned to push him off. Daniel stood beside her.
Not a younger figure in a remembered room. Not a voice from an empty sofa. He wore the brown shirt he had worn on the day he died, with one cuff rolled higher than the other. He was thirty-eight. His hair lay badly above one ear, where it always flattened when he slept. She had once smoothed it with her hand every morning and complained that he ought to buy a better pillow.
He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
“Look at you,” he said.
Elena forgot the stair beneath her feet. She put a hand on his chest. His heart beat under the shirt. The beat was not a sound she remembered deliberately, but her body knew it, knew where to settle beside it.
“Daniel?”
“I'm here.”
Miles came forward. “Elena.”
She held up her free hand without looking at him. Daniel took the other one and kissed the knuckles, turning it to find the little callus beneath her middle finger.
“Still working too hard,” he said.
It was the right thing to say and not quite right. Daniel had died before she opened the second studio. He had known how hard she worked; he had not known what the last nine years had asked of her.
She looked at his face. He waited, smiling faintly, with the maddening patience he had used when he thought she was about to start a row he could prevent by being kind.
“Where have you been?”
He glanced toward the sitting room. “Waiting.”
“All this time?”
“Come sit with me.”
Miles said her name again. This time there was anger in it.
“He's using what it has,” he said. “You saw what it does.”
Daniel looked at him. “I know what I asked of you.”
Miles went pale. “Don't say that.”
“You agreed.”
“Don't.”
Elena stepped between them. The hall had become too small for these men and the things she wanted from them. Behind Daniel the sitting room glowed with lamplight. The floral sofa was there, and a fire in the grate, and a book he had left facedown because she would accuse him of breaking its spine.
“I want to talk to him,” she said.
Miles stared at her. “Alone?”
“A minute.”
Daniel squeezed her hand. Miles watched it happen. She could see him looking for something she might recognize as wrong.
“Don't shut the door,” he said.
She went into the room with Daniel. Behind her Miles stayed in the hall.