The wall beside the jammed door became transparent. Through it Elena saw the hall widen into the café. She pressed her palm to it; the plaster held. The bolt and frame remained solid between her and Miles.
Elena stepped away. The fern paper was coming loose from the wall. Beneath it yellow tiles appeared, then a long counter, a coffee machine, a shelf that sagged beneath tins. The café Miles had shown her on his phone was taking shape inside the house.
Rain shone beyond its front window. A man in a green coat came in, wiping his glasses. Sana stood behind the counter with a pencil through her hair. She told him that if he wanted yesterday's soup he would have to return yesterday. He laughed and asked for coffee instead.
None of them looked at Elena. She stayed inside the sitting room, but the café memory spread across both sides of the locked door. A small table appeared on the carpet beside her, with two women arguing over a crossword. One had written a word in pen and the other regarded that as an act of aggression.
At the counter, another Miles was cutting bread.
He was younger by a few years, wearing a white apron with flour near the pocket. Sana asked him where the delivery receipt was. He said it was in the drawer. She said the drawer contained six receipts and a screwdriver. He asked her to be more specific. She hit him on the shoulder with a folded paper, and he smiled, then took a cup from the machine before it overflowed.
The smell was wonderful: coffee, warm bread, damp wool coats. After the lake and the old marriage rooms, Elena felt the life of this place almost as heat against her skin. A child near the window was spooning foam out of her father's cup. Miles saw and gave her a little cup of her own. When Sana looked at him, he shrugged as if he had meant to make extra foam all along.
He had told Elena he wanted mornings. This was one.
The present Miles stood in the flooded hall on the other side of the bolted door, his right shoulder braced against its frame. He was trying to pull his hand free. His face had turned gray. The remembered café went on around him. A chair passed through his leg as a customer stood up, and he shuddered as though it had taken warmth from him.
“Sana,” he said.
The woman behind the counter turned toward the remembered Miles. “Yes?”
Present Miles shut his eyes. “Not you. Not you.”
The water rose over his knees. It was clear enough that Elena could see the floor tiles beneath it, but the tiles were fading. Below them lay the white sheet from the prepared guest bed.
Daniel came beside Elena. His shirt was dry. She could still feel the kiss on her mouth.
“He loved this,” he said.
“He loves it.”
“It won't be taken from him here.”
She looked at the customers. Their morning repeated. The man wiped his glasses again. The same receipt fell from the same drawer. The child took foam from the cup, and her father laughed with precisely the same breath.
Present Miles was trying not to watch. His free hand pressed against his chest, holding his phone above the water. It sounded once. An ordinary message, coming from outside. He looked down at it and made a choking sound.
“What is it?” Elena asked.
He lifted his head. He could see her through the fading wall, across the café memory, but the locked door still held him outside. In the space between them the kitchen table stretched farther away whenever he tried to move.
“She says the freezer's ours,” he said. “They're charging us for someone else's.”
Elena had nothing to answer. He laughed once, sharply, and the laugh became a groan as the door moved against his hand.
She went toward him. A chair appeared in her path. She pushed it over. The women with the crossword turned, though neither looked at her face. Their mouths opened at the same time. For a moment they had Daniel's voice.
“Stay.”
Elena climbed over the fallen chair. The café tiles faded from beneath her feet, leaving the sitting-room carpet. She reached the inside face of the locked door. Across the threshold, Miles stood in the flooded hall, still overlaid by the café. His hand was trapped in the split below the bolt. Blood moved in the water beneath it.
She pulled the bolt. It would not move.
Behind her Daniel said, “You'll lose me.”
She turned to him. He stood with the blanket over one arm, ready to put it around her shoulders. He looked tired now, almost like the man at the end of their marriage, the man who used to fall asleep before the second glass of wine and deny it when she woke him. The house had found another thing she missed.
Elena took the blanket from him.
For a second he smiled. She threw it onto the floor beside the door and went to the fireplace. The poker was warm from standing near the grate. She wrapped her sleeve around its handle.
“El,” Daniel said.
She drove its point beneath the brass bolt.
The wood cracked. Miles cried out. She stopped, then heard him say, “Again.”
She lifted the poker, both hands on it, and struck the fixing harder.