The appointment after Vivian's conversation was a woman who wanted a hem raised and did not want to discuss her knees. She said this three times. Beth assured her, three times, that nobody would need to discuss them.
Claire stayed at the back of the studio, putting photographs of Ruth onto Beth's laptop. Vivian had gone upstairs to Maris's little office to call a supplier, and the studio had resumed being a studio with an abruptness Claire couldn't have managed alone. Thread, measurements, money, another woman's wish to look nice on a Thursday. Beth dealt with all of it while the unfinished cardigan lay on the table beside her.
After the client left, Beth lifted the blue dress from its bag to check Ruth's final seam. Vivian came down and asked to hold it against the window. The yellow inserts caught the low light and seemed brighter than they had earlier.
“I'd wear that,” Vivian said.
“You can't. It's Ruth's.”
“I'd ask nicely.”
Beth smiled. “That wouldn't work either.”
Claire took the used body from her bag.
She had brought it intentionally. She had told herself the ordinary photographs would be useful for Beth's page, which was true, and that if anything appeared in them tonight it might help, which was the part she had not said aloud. The body felt the same in her hand. It didn't warm or resist or announce itself. The worn edge of the strap lay against her wrist.
“Can you hold the seam open?” she asked Beth.
Beth bent over the dress laid across the fitting chair. Her fingers spread the yellow panel. Claire took two photographs, one wide enough to show Beth's face and the familiar mirror behind her, another of the work.
“That one?” Beth asked, looking at the camera.
Claire nodded.
“So you're asking it.”
“I don't know if it works that way.”
“You're asking anyway.”
She didn't sound angry. Curious, afraid, unwilling to say the fear before it was necessary. Claire showed her the two ordinary images. Beth examined her own hand on the cloth, said her nails looked terrible, and asked for the wider one too.
“People should know it's a person making it.”
Vivian took her bag from beside the chair. Beth would take her to the flat after locking up. Tomorrow Graham would bring two cases, a box of samples, and whatever clothes she had managed to list without telling him the list was an exit.
“He said he'd be here at three,” Beth told Claire.
“Will Maris be here?”
“Not till four. She has an appointment of her own.”
“Perhaps I should come earlier.”
Beth looked at her. “You're coming anyway.”
It felt like a kindness. Claire accepted it before she could find the conditions attached.
At home she transferred the photographs while there was still light in the kitchen. The ordinary ones came first. Beth's hands, the yellow cloth, the blue dress. Then the fitting room appeared without the dress.
Claire saw blood before she understood whose it was.
Beth was on the floor. The great mirror lay across the carpet in front of her, tilted onto its broken corner. Her right hand was beneath the heavy edge, fingers visible beyond it. Blood ran over the backs of two fingers and made a smear where her wrist met the frame. Her other hand gripped the wood as if she were trying to lift it. In the fractured glass was part of her face, drawn with pain.
The timestamp said tomorrow afternoon.
Claire reached for the phone and dropped it. It landed against the chair leg. She bent to pick it up, not taking her eyes from the screen, and almost struck her forehead on the desk.
Beth answered on the second ring.
“What is it?”
“The mirror. Your hand.”
“Slow down.”
“It's come again. You're on the floor. Your hand's under the mirror.”
There was a pause. Claire heard Vivian ask something in the background.
“Send it,” Beth said.
Claire sent a rendered copy. The received file remained open on the screen. After a few moments Beth made a sound, low and involuntary.
“Tomorrow?”
“Afternoon. When he's coming.”
“You don't know he does it.”
“I know he hit Evan.”
“That's not the same as knowing.”
“We can't let you be there.”
“I'm going to be there.”
“Beth.”
“It's my studio.”
Claire rose, already looking for her keys. “Cancel the delivery. Tell him to leave everything outside.”
“Vivian needs to be able to go. She needs the samples. He won't put them on the pavement and drive away.”
“Then don't take them.”
“It's easier for you to say that than her.”
Claire looked at Beth's hand in the image. The hand that had pinched a seam, marked her trousers, moved with an ease she had known since childhood. She wanted to make the image impossible by removing her sister from everything around it.
“I won't have you hurt,” she said.
“How will you manage that?”
The question stopped her because Beth had asked it plainly, without defiance. Claire looked again at the studio floor, the fitting chair beside the mirror, the cutting table at the frame's edge.
“We could move it.”
“Yes,” Beth said.
“Away from where you work.”
“Yes.”
“And keep the side door clear.”
“We always should.”
Claire drew a breath. “Evan said he'd help. He could wait there. Outside, with the car.”
“Ask him.”
Claire kept seeing the blood as Beth said she would meet her at the studio in the morning. She offered to move the mirror tonight. Beth said she wanted to eat something and sit down, and waited until Claire said morning would be fine.
After the call she looked at the photographs beside the extra one. Vivian and Sam on the road; Beth outside the house, Claire and Evan at the window; Beth under the mirror. Only Vivian and Beth had also been subjects in the batches that preceded those images. That was a connection, not a rule that accounted for everyone in them.
She took two unused cards from a packet and put one in each body. Before using them she phoned Beth again.
“I want to try something. Nothing with you in it.”
“What will that tell you?”
“Whether I can ask it for a place. Stay on the phone.”
She wrote MIRROR TOMORROW on a sheet and put it beside the workroom clock. She photographed the paper with the used body. Then the clock, then the empty chair. Beth counted the three clicks aloud. Claire took the same three pictures with her familiar camera and copied each card into a separate new folder.
“Six,” she said.
“And?”
“Six.”
She opened the used body's last image full screen. Her empty chair. No studio, no mirror, no answer to the words she'd set in front of it. She imported the card again, then the earlier studio card. Nothing new arrived in either folder. The mirror image was still in the first transfer, dated tomorrow, her sister's hand still bloody.
“Maybe it needs a person,” Claire said.
“Maybe it doesn't do what you want when you want.”
“I could take one of myself.”
“What if it gives you one? Will you be here all night finding things you're afraid of?”
Claire put the camera down. It was the first part of the experiment that she had chosen to stop.
“I'll see you in the morning,” she said.
“With your hands free,” Beth said. “We're moving furniture.”
After they hung up, Claire reread the dealer's email from that morning: the seller said the equipment had belonged to an uncle, used mostly for boats and family occasions. No known faults. The uncle was dead. There was no earlier owner waiting to explain a mechanism, only a receipt and a body which sometimes added a file when she first brought photographs across. It had done nothing for the clock, the bowl, the window, or the written demand. She wrote those failures down as carefully as the three arrivals. She could not call the pattern dependable because she wanted an answer tomorrow.
She put the body on the desk. It wasn't giving her answers. It had given her a moment with no before and no after, and she had to make something of it.
Evan answered her call without saying her name.
“Beth needs help tomorrow,” Claire said.
She described the image. He was quiet until she reached the blood, then asked whether Beth had seen it.
“Yes. We're moving the mirror.”
“Where do you want me?”
She explained the side exit and the yard. He knew the building; he'd passed it for years. He would park where the women could get to him without crossing Graham's path, and take them wherever they chose to go.
“You don't need to come in,” Claire said.
“I wasn't planning to.”
She heard the restraint in his voice, and her own relief was not entirely fair. She wanted his help without having his anger in the room. He wanted the women safe enough to ask the questions she had helped him ask. Neither of them was finished with yesterday.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Tell Beth I'll be there.”
When they hung up, Claire remained at the desk. The bright yellow cloth in the ordinary fitting picture looked almost insolent beside the other image.
She opened Graham's contact.
She could let him arrive without warning. Move the mirror, make room, let Vivian go. But he had hit Evan quickly, without the build of violence Claire imagined such a thing required. She wanted him to stop before he entered. She wanted him to know something larger than his own wishes was waiting there.
She sent him the image of Beth's trapped hand.
His response came a minute later.
What is this?
She called him.
“Where did you get that?” he asked without a greeting.
“I don't know how to explain it.”
“It looks like Beth. Is she hurt?”
“No.”
“Then what are you sending me?”
“Something that hasn't happened.”
He gave a short laugh. “Claire.”
“The date is tomorrow. When you're due there.”
“You can put any date on anything.”
“I know.”
“Then what's the point of this?”
She looked at the broken corner, the diagonal crack through the reflection of Beth's face.
“Bring Vivian's things. Let her go. Don't come angry.”
“I wasn't going to come angry.”
“You hit Evan.”
“You saw what happened.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then his voice became lower, almost confiding.
“Vivian's had a horrible week. I understand she needs some space. I'm trying to give her that. I don't need pictures of accidents being sent to me.”
“Then keep it an accident that doesn't happen.”
“Is that a threat?”
Claire shook her head before remembering he couldn't see her. “It's a warning.”
“I don't want Beth hurt.”
“Good.”
He said her name again, more softly. She ended the call before he could make her feel unreasonable for wanting that one thing.
Afterward she sat still, aware that she had done something she had not discussed with Beth. It could help. Graham had now seen the mirror before it fell. He knew she would be there, that she was watching for more than another argument.
Claire laid her phone face down. She ate a piece of bread at the kitchen counter and tried not to imagine how much force a mirror that size needed to trap a hand.