Mae brought the jacket in a bag which still had the name of a shop Celia liked.
“Don't tell me it's old,” she said.
“I wasn't going to.”
“You were looking at the handles.”
“They're nearly gone.”
“I know. I carry it from the bottom. Like an expensive baby.”
Rachel cleared the worktable. Mae set the bag down and took out a cream jacket, light enough for August evenings but with a narrow lining which had started tearing at the shoulder.
“I thought I could do it.”
“Did you?”
“Look.”
Inside there were six uneven stitches. Rachel examined them without commenting.
“They'll come out,” Mae said.
“Yes.”
“That's the extent of the praise, then.”
Rachel smiled. Mae took off her own cardigan and put on the jacket. One shoulder sat higher because she'd drawn the lining tight.
“It makes you look as if you're about to leave,” Rachel said.
“I usually am.”
They stood before the mirror. Rachel loosened Mae's stitches and felt the fabric settle.
“Oh,” Mae said. “That's better already.”
“It's repairable.”
“I knew you would say that.”
Rachel wanted to answer something about always being able to repair a lining. Instead she asked whether the jacket was for the concert.
“Yes. Unless you tell me I'm being ridiculous.”
“About the jacket?”
“About continuing.”
Rachel looked at the two women in the mirror. Mae's hair was greyer at the front than it had been last summer. She'd stopped covering the grey three years ago, then complained that everyone congratulated her as if she had volunteered to climb something.
“Why would you stop?”
“It's the same anniversary.”
“I know.”
“The same people. I've spent fourteen years thanking them.”
“For what?”
“Coming. Caring. Giving money so the young ones can learn something and Celia can have a useful name.”
Mae took off the jacket and put it in Rachel's hands.
“The article came out. About Anna.”
“Yes.”
“Everybody's being very considerate. At school they ask if I need a room. As if grief is something I might take in there and leave before lunch.”
Rachel remembered Mae working through an entire week of office calls before her sister's funeral because somebody still needed to make the school run. She had offered help then. Mae asked her to answer one particular email, and Rachel was offended by how small the task was until she tried to do it.
“What would you do in the room?” Rachel asked.
“Mostly look at their motivational poster. We have one about attendance.”
They laughed. Mae sat on the stool, facing the worktable.
“I can't bear everybody understanding.”
“What would you prefer?”
“Celia telling them to stop fussing. Then complaining that no one had brought her tea.”
Rachel laid the jacket flat.
“She would.”
“She had a talent for it.”
“She called once from the flat because she wanted me to bring milk up.”
“You were downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“She could make an errand sound like the person doing it had won something.”
“It was raining.”
“That was probably your fault, too.”
Rachel remembered the phone call. The shop was busy, Celia had a headache, Martin was going to come over with supper. She'd gone to the little supermarket and bought milk on the way upstairs. Celia kissed her cheek, took the bag and said she'd saved her life.
That was a few months before the murder. Rachel still liked the memory. Mae was smiling.
“I miss being furious with her,” Mae said.
Rachel unpicked the remaining stitches. There was no answer she could give which would let them both keep smiling.
Mae opened her own bag and took out the event folder.
“The bands are still expecting it.”
“Of course.”
“Low Weather. Two others. The school lot earlier. Tess's group asked about the time because they need to be away for something afterwards.”
“The tour.”
“I know. I've put them at a sensible point, not three minutes before everyone leaves. They'll get their fee and a table for the shirts. I think they're making the shirts themselves.”
“They are.”
“Then I hope they've got more skill than I have with a needle.”
“Different kind of making.”
Mae opened the folder, checked a page and closed it.
“I don't want to turn it into people standing around talking about court reports. It was Celia's concert before this week.”
Rachel felt the phrase as if Mae had laid another piece of fabric on the table and asked her to work with it.
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
Mae watched her.
“You were the one who had to go in.”
Rachel's hand was beneath the lining. She could feel the little torn edge against her finger.
“It wasn't only me.”
“I know. You were her friend. They stood you in that room and made you explain finding her.”
Outside, a boy ran past the window dragging a scooter behind him. It caught against the paving and rattled until he lifted it.
Mae said, “They're saying the blood didn't mean what they thought.”
“I've read that.”
“So everybody's asking what happens to the rest.”
Rachel could have put down the jacket.
“Your evidence,” Mae said.
Rachel's throat tightened. Fourteen years ago she had worn a dark suit somebody told her would look serious. She remembered the weight of the sleeve as she raised her hand.
“I know what I said.”
Mae looked down at the bag, its frayed handles folded neatly against each other.
“I'm not asking you to go through it.”
There was relief in the room which Rachel hadn't earned.
“I didn't think you were.”
“I just don't like pretending nothing's happened.”
Rachel drew the jacket toward her.
“No.”
Mae rested a hand on the worktable.
“I don't know what I'm supposed to feel about Anna.”
“You don't have to know.”
“I've had enough people say that.”
Tess had said the same thing. Rachel heard how easily she offered sentences which let the other person stay where she could manage them.
“She came in,” Rachel said.
Mae's hand stopped.
“Here?”
“Wednesday.”
“To see you?”
“Yes.”
“What did she want?”
“To meet Tess.”
Mae looked toward the back chairs, then at Rachel again.
“Why you?”
“She thought I could help.”
“And did you?”
“They met yesterday morning. Before we opened.”
Mae was looking at the chairs.
“I remember that child coming to the first concert. She sat on Leonard's lap and put her hands over her ears.”
Rachel remembered seeing them across the room, the grandfather with the rigid back and Tess trying to make the sound smaller. She had been giving people programmes, thanking them, moving easily between families.
“She's different now.”
“I know she is. I've heard her play.”
The little rebuke was deserved. Mae had booked the band because she liked them, not because Rachel loved Tess.
“How was the meeting?” Mae asked.
“Awkward. Then there was a bit which was better.”
“You do make things bearable.”
Rachel cut the thread.
“Sometimes.”
Mae looked at the jacket, then her own failed stitches.
“More often than me.”
She stayed while Rachel marked the repair. They discussed the event table, a woman who insisted on volunteering and then leaving at eight, where the little school group would wait if it rained. The Assembly Rooms had two entrances, and somebody always chose the wrong one. Mae asked Rachel to help with the greeting table, as usual, and Rachel said she would.
“I don't want a row of us looking tragic,” Mae said. “It's a concert.”
“What do you want me to wear?”
“Something you can sit down in. Last year you looked pinned in place.”
“That dress was very good.”
“It was. You couldn't breathe.”
Rachel laughed. Celia would have agreed with Mae, then borrowed the dress.
When Mae put her cardigan on, she stood a moment beside the framed photograph of the shop opening. Rachel and Celia in the doorway, the sign still too bright above their heads.
“I always think she looks younger in that one.”
“She was.”
“Not just younger. As if she doesn't know anything yet.”
“She knew plenty.”
Mae smiled.
“That's my fault. I keep making her a child. She'd hate it.”
Rachel looked at Celia in the photograph. Celia had chosen the sign's colour, argued over the counter, lent Anna money, slept with Martin. She had been older than the child Mae missed and younger than the age Rachel now lived inside.
Mae touched the frame once and left.
Rachel stood beside the worktable with the jacket in her hands. She'd agreed to greet people at an event for Celia. She would look calm when they arrived. Anna might come, or might not. Tess would play.
The shop door opened before she could put the jacket away.
A man held up a dress bag.
“My wife says you'll know.”
Rachel took it.
“What does she say I'll know?”
“How to stop this happening.”
He pointed at a broken fastening. His confidence was so complete she wanted to refuse the bag just to make the afternoon different.
Instead she showed him where the fabric had been caught.
“Does she need it tonight?”
“Yes.”
“What time can you come back?”
He told her. Rachel wrote it on a slip and asked him to let his wife know it wasn't a difficult repair. He looked relieved.
For an hour she had things she could finish.
Tess arrived late in the afternoon to collect the safety pins Rachel had set aside. She was on her way to Ruby's, carrying a tote with a sleeve sticking out.
“What's that?”
“Something which was a shirt.”
“Is it still a shirt?”
“Debatable.”
Rachel reached for it. Tess drew the bag closer.
“No. We're doing it.”
“Can I look?”
“You'll look with scissors.”
Rachel smiled, then lowered her hand.
“Mae came.”
“I saw her. She asked whether we needed a table bigger than the shirt box.”
“Do you?”
“If anyone buys one.”
“Someone will.”
“Granddad. He'll buy a medium so he can tell people he's a medium.”
Tess leaned on the counter. Rachel could smell sun and the fabric she carried.
“Did you message Anna?”
“She messaged me.”
“What did she say?”
“She's working at the Anchor.”
Rachel looked at the time on the till. Anna had been a woman with a shift while Mae was here imagining the court.
“Good for her.”
Tess nodded.
“She said that. Not 'come and see me'. Just she's working.”
“Would you go?”
“Not to watch her work.”
“All right.”
“Maybe somewhere else.”
Rachel set the safety pins on the bag and let Tess choose the next sentence. None came. She said goodbye, then went back to Mae's jacket.
That evening she made the repair by hand. The small stitches were easiest under the lamp at the back, with the shop dark beyond it. She finished the shoulder, laid the jacket across a chair and looked at the faint shape it made.
On the event sheet Mae had given her, Rachel's name stood beside the greeting table.
She folded the page and put it in the drawer below the till, where she kept things she meant to do.