Anna got as far as the steps before she saw Celia's face.
It was a small photograph in the middle of the concert poster, less prominent than the bright yellow lettering. Celia had one shoulder lifted, as if someone had taken the picture while she was laughing at a thing she didn't intend to share. Anna remembered that look. You could mistake it for an invitation.
She checked the time on her phone. Twenty past seven. Mae had said half past, but the doors were open.
Inside, a man in a paint-marked sweatshirt was putting chairs on a trolley. He looked at Anna, then at the poster behind her.
“Concert's Saturday.”
“I know. I'm meeting Mae.”
“Through there.”
She went through the foyer and found Mae sitting at a table with a programme open in front of her. Two cups stood beside it. Anna looked at them before she could stop herself.
“One's mine,” Mae said. “Other one's cold. You want tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sit down, then.”
Anna sat opposite her. Mae's cream jacket was over the back of the chair. A loose thread hung from the underside of the table, and Anna wound it round her finger.
Mae said, “She's told me.”
Anna let go of the thread.
“All of it?”
“I don't know what all of it would look like, do I?”
“The letter.”
“Yes.”
“Martin.”
“Yes.”
Neither woman said anything for a moment.
A door banged in the other room. The man with the trolley called to somebody, then began to whistle.
Anna had rehearsed coming in. She'd imagined Mae standing up, perhaps reaching for her hand. She had worried about being embraced by a woman she hardly knew and about failing to cry if it happened. Instead Mae was rubbing a thumbnail along the edge of the programme.
“I'm sorry,” Anna said.
Mae looked up.
“For Celia. I'm sorry about her.”
“You were sorry fourteen years ago.”
“I was.”
“I didn't believe you.”
Anna felt the admission land, then waited for something to follow it. Mae turned the programme over.
“You weren't the only one,” Anna said.
“No.”
“But you could say it now.”
Mae's mouth tightened. Anna heard her own voice in the room, hard and ordinary. She hadn't meant to make the first minutes a demand.
Mae said, “I'm sorry I believed you killed her.”
Anna looked at her.
“And that I said it. To people.”
“How many?”
“I don't know.”
Anna nodded, although nothing in her wanted to accept an uncounted number.
Mae leaned back. “I can't do this as a list.”
“I didn't bring a list.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
The chairs scraped beyond the door. Anna wished the man would stop whistling.
Mae put her hand over the programme, covering the photograph inside.
“I've had less than two hours,” she said. “You rang and I said come. I thought it might be better if we talked. I don't know whether it is.”
“I can go.”
“That's not what I said.”
Anna stayed where she was.
The whistling stopped.
“I want to speak on Saturday,” she said.
Mae shut her eyes briefly.
“At the concert.”
“Yes.”
“About this.”
“About what happened to me.”
Mae's hand remained on the page.
“It's for Celia.”
“I know.”
“And the music fund. There are people coming whose children have had things paid for by it. Instruments, lessons. It isn't just an evening for saying how terrible her death was.”
“Tess is playing.”
“I know that too.”
“She shouldn't lose that.”
“I haven't cancelled her.”
Anna felt foolish. She'd entered the room ready to defend a girl whose band was already printed on the poster.
Mae moved her hand. “They agreed to play months ago. Everybody did. There's a room hired, tickets sold. You can't turn the whole thing round in a week.”
“I'm not asking for the whole thing.”
“What are you asking for?”
“To stand in front of people who thought I killed your sister and tell them I didn't.”
“That decision's public already.”
“It isn't the same.”
Mae looked at her for long enough that Anna began to arrange the words again.
“The court said the conviction was unsafe. People can hear that and think it means they couldn't prove it. They can think I got lucky. Someone stood up and said they'd seen me and they knew they hadn't. I want to say what that did. In my own voice.”
“I understand.”
Anna nearly asked if she did. She swallowed the question. Mae's eyes were red, and she had been running her nail along the paper so long the edge was starting to separate.
“I can't have Celia turned into the reason everybody's life was ruined,” Mae said.
“I wasn't going to.”
“She slept with him.”
Anna waited.
“She was cruel sometimes. I know she was. People will like knowing that. They'll say she brought it on herself. They'll say it with their faces even if they don't say it out loud.”
“I won't say that.”
“Rachel was her friend.”
Anna looked toward the chairs.
“I slapped her,” she said. “That night. I did.”
Mae held still.
“She said something about Tess, and I hit her. I hated her at that minute. I'm not pretending I didn't.”
“You hit her hard enough to draw blood.”
“Yes.”
“You knew that?”
“Yes.”
Anna could still see the way Celia had touched her own mouth, almost delicately. Then looked at her finger.
“I left her alive,” she said.
“I know.”
Anna turned back.
Mae's voice had been quiet. The words weren't an absolution for the slap. She hadn't asked for one. They were enough that Anna couldn't immediately answer.
Mae reached for the cup and discovered it was empty.
“My sister could be horrible,” she said. “I miss her. Sometimes I miss the horrible things. She knew exactly what I meant when I rang her.”
Anna hadn't prepared for that. The Celia she carried was mainly a face across a room and the heavy presence of a dead woman in a case. Mae was talking about ringing someone because something had happened at work.
“What did she call you?” Anna asked.
“What?”
“Did she have a name for you? A stupid one.”
Mae looked wary.
“Maypole. When we were children. I was tall first.”
Anna smiled before she meant to.
“She wasn't very imaginative.”
“No,” Mae said. Then, after a moment, “She thought it was extremely funny.”
The man came into the foyer holding two mismatched glasses.
“Are these from the kitchen?”
Mae pointed him toward a cupboard. He put them away and asked whether the back rows needed to be out for Saturday.
“Yes,” she said. “We'll need them.”
He nodded and went back through.
Anna looked at her.
“It's going ahead?”
“I think it has to.”
“Rachel?”
“I don't want her at the greeting table. I don't want her greeting anybody.”
Anna let herself breathe.
“But people need to hear her correct it,” Mae said. “From her. If she just disappears, it leaves everyone else doing the saying.”
“She should say she lied.”
“Yes.”
“And that she knew.”
“Yes.”
Anna could imagine the room. The heads turning. She wanted to be there when Rachel said it, and she wanted to stand up afterwards while the words were still uncomfortable.
Mae seemed to see some of that in her face.
“The bands have their own evening. I don't want a young person going on straight after something like that and having to change the whole room by singing.”
“So when?”
“I don't know yet.”
Anna pressed her thumb into the seam of her trousers.
Mae said, “Rachel before the music, perhaps. At the beginning. And you afterwards, if you still want to.”
“I will.”
“After the set. Separately. Your words.”
Anna heard the word afterwards and thought of people putting their coats on.
“They might leave.”
“Some might.”
“I've waited fourteen years.”
Mae sat forward.
“And people have been coming here for fourteen years because my sister died.”
Anna looked down. She hated being made to feel she was taking something, and she hated that Mae had something to protect which was real.
“I don't want to take her evening away,” she said.
“I believe you don't want to.”
It wasn't quite trust. Anna accepted it anyway.
Mae pulled a blank piece of paper from under the programme.
“I'll speak to the people who need to know. I'll work out how we can do it. I won't promise you everyone stays. I won't promise they hear you the way you want.”
“Can I have someone with me?”
Mae's eyes went to Anna's phone on the table.
“I'd need to know who.”
“I haven't asked yet.”
“Then ask.”
Anna nodded.
She wanted to put Tess in the chair beside her, suddenly and with extraordinary clarity. Not the four-year-old whose hair she used to plait too tightly. Tess the town had seen growing up without her. People could look at them together and understand the size of the space.
She picked up the phone before Mae could see the thought more plainly.
“Thank you.”
“I haven't done it yet.”
“For saying I can speak.”
Mae folded the blank paper once.
“Send me what you want to say, if you can. You don't have to make it pretty. Just so we know what we're doing.”
Anna stood. Mae stayed seated.
At the door Anna turned.
“I really am sorry she's gone.”
Mae looked at the programme.
“I know.”
Outside, Anna stopped beneath the poster. Low Weather appeared in the bottom half, Tess's name nowhere on it because she belonged to a band. Anna traced the printed line with her eyes.
She took out her phone and began a message to her daughter.
Mae said I can speak after—
She deleted it. Tess was rehearsing. This wasn't something to squeeze between songs.
Anna put the phone away and walked down the steps. Behind her, a trolley rattled over the threshold. The room was still being made ready.