Mina was still waiting when Nora finished the toast.
“I panicked,” Nora said.
“About what?”
“They said someone thought she'd killed me. I hadn't even got dressed.”
“So you forgot who she was?”
Nora folded the empty paper bag. There was grease on the bottom, a dark shape which would go through to the table if she left it there.
“I didn't want to get into it.”
Mina pulled out the chair opposite her. She hadn't taken her coat off.
“Are you saying you don't want to get into it with me, either?”
“Iris and I fell out. She left. I've had nothing from her since.”
All true. Nora heard the care she'd taken over it.
“Is that how you hurt yourself?”
The bag tore beneath her thumb. She put it in the bin.
“Cal took me to hospital.”
“I know that.”
“He looked after me.”
“I'm not saying he didn't.”
Nora wanted Mina to be angry. Anger would let her argue back. This steady effort to understand what a friend had not told her was much harder to refuse.
“I can't do it all again now,” she said.
Mina looked toward her left arm. Nora felt the shame of using something which genuinely hurt to stop a question she deserved.
“All right,” Mina said. “But if they ask me whether she stayed here, she stayed here.”
“I didn't ask you to say anything else.”
“Good.”
The word left them both embarrassed. Nora went to fetch her coat, and Mina came after her to hold the left sleeve open. For a moment Nora considered refusing the help. Then she stood still and accepted it.
They went to the showroom in a taxi. Mina gave the address while Nora fastened the seat belt, working it around the injured arm. Outside, a cyclist shouted at a delivery van. A woman in a suit hurried across the road carrying two coffees with the urgent care of someone who would suffer if either spilled. Nora watched her and wanted that sort of morning. A small task, a person expecting her, a manageable disaster.
Mina answered a message, then held out her phone.
“This is the chair she's ordered the cabinet to match.”
Nora looked at a photograph of a blue velvet chair on a deep red rug.
“It doesn't have to match it.”
“I know. Tell her.”
“That chair doesn't even match itself.”
Mina laughed once, unwillingly. “It's expensive.”
“So is dentistry.”
They looked at the photograph together. The velvet was a handsome colour; the shape was wrong. Nora would have kept the chair, because the woman who bought it clearly loved it, and made everything around it quieter. She described the cabinet with different handles, the way the red would look if it appeared again somewhere small rather than in a second piece of furniture. Mina listened, then took her phone back.
“Send me that before you forget.”
It was the first thing Nora had said all morning which someone wanted to use.
The showroom occupied the ground floor of a narrow former shop. From the pavement the front window still made it look unfinished: paper taped along the bottom of the glass, a coil of cable on the floor, two pale rectangles where Nora had rejected the first wall colour. Beyond those ordinary failures, the room had changed.
She stopped just inside.
Cal had finished the long display wall. It stood clear of the old plaster, with a shelf running at a height which made you want to put something down and remain. The concealed light beneath it was off. Daylight caught the upper edge instead, showing the faint unevenness she had asked him to preserve.
Mina's cabinet stood against the far wall, on its moving blankets. Oak, low and wide, with doors which did not pretend the tree had grown in straight lines. Nora had seen it in the workshop, half made and dusted white. Here its quietness filled the room.
“Don't say it's too small,” Mina said.
“It's too far back.”
Cal looked up from a box of fixings.
“She's here five seconds.”
“Four,” Mina said.
He got to his feet. Nora had wanted to come in and find him exactly like this, busy with the work she had asked for, his hair flat on one side where he'd been wearing a cap. Seeing him steadied her. She hated that it did, after their phone call, after Mina's questions.
He came across and kissed the side of her head.
“You ate?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Mina, who nodded.
“Don't check,” Nora said.
“I wasn't checking.”
“You were.”
“Then don't make it so rewarding.”
He took her coat without being asked. When she held on to it, he let go at once, and she felt foolish for making it a contest.
“Where do you want the cabinet?” he asked.
Nora walked toward it. The showroom was narrow enough that poor placement would turn it into a corridor, visitors sliding past beautiful things they never properly saw. Too far forward and Mina's cabinet would stop everyone at the door. Too far back and it would become the place you expected someone to keep brochures.
“Off the wall,” she said. “Turn it. Not much.”
Cal and Mina took opposite ends. Nora began to reach for a corner and stopped before either could tell her to. The stopping hurt more than she'd expected. For years she'd been useful because she knew where to put her hands.
“Toward me,” she said. “Yes. There.”
They set it down. Mina stood back, then moved to the doorway.
“You can't see the side from here.”
“You will when you come in.”
“The side's the best bit.”
“The front's the invitation.”
Mina looked at the cabinet, then at Nora. “That sounds like something you'd say to a client.”
“Clients are allowed to be right.”
Cal nudged the nearer end a fraction with his knee. Now the side caught the light from the window. Nora raised a hand.
“That's it.”
He smiled without looking at her. He knew.
Nora opened one door. The wood felt warm even in the unheated room. Mina had cut the grip into the edge rather than adding a handle, and it met Nora's fingers exactly where they wanted to rest. Inside, a small sliding tray moved without a sound.
“I still think you should charge more,” Nora said.
“I still think you should pay what I do charge.”
Mina said it lightly. Nora laughed, although there was nothing light about knowing she could pay because of the night at Wren House.
Cal had gone back to his box. His shoulders were relaxed. The police would speak to him; he had said they could. If he could get on with the morning, perhaps she could, too.
She found the ceramic bowl wrapped in an old towel and carried it to the cabinet. The bowl was grey outside, bright yellow within. Against the oak, it did what she wanted: gave the room one place where it looked as though someone had been unable to resist something.
Mina watched her put it down.
“I thought that was for the window.”
“I've changed my mind.”
“Of course you have.”
“Look from the door.”
Mina did. Cal followed her. Nora remained by the cabinet, unwilling to say more until they'd seen it.
For a few seconds there were no questions. The room held the three of them in different places, looking at a thing they had made together. Nora imagined the blankets gone, the paint dry, coats hanging by the entrance, someone pausing here because they wanted a room of their own to feel like this.
“Needs the bench,” Nora said.
Cal looked toward the window. “Yes.”
The bench was at his storage unit in Essex: a plain old elm seat with a beautifully worn top and ugly later legs, which Nora had replaced. She wanted it below the front window. People could sit without believing they were committing themselves to buying something. It would also show that age wasn't a reason to leave a piece exactly as it was, even if someone like Dominic could raise his eyebrows until you felt ignorant for having an opinion.
“I'll bring it,” Cal said.
He reached for a fixing that had rolled against the skirting. Nora waited until he straightened before asking about the wrapping.
“It's wrapped separately?”
“Yes.”
“Not under the boards?”
“Yes, Nora, I built an entire wall and then put your bench beneath a pile of timber.”
“You've put things beneath other things before.”
“That's the principle of storage.”
Mina moved the blankets off the cabinet. Nora let herself laugh.
On the counter by the little back sink, Cal had put her set of keys in a shallow tin. The spare storage key was on its own green ring, beside the front-door keys and a small key for the cupboard where she planned to keep clients' samples. He'd given her the spare when they began moving pieces out of her apartment. At the time she had liked having something of his which opened without asking him to come along.
She took the green ring out.
“Leave that here,” he said. “You'll lose it in your bag.”
“I won't.”
“There's no point both of us driving out.”
“I'm not driving anywhere.”
“Exactly.”
He was looking at her arm, making a sensible point. She set the key back in the tin. It made a small, unsatisfying noise.
Mina straightened up with the blankets folded over her forearm.
“Do you want these in the back?”
Nora said yes. Cal picked up the box and followed Mina through, clearing the floor. They had given her the empty room. She could do what she wanted with it.
A woman stopped outside the window.
Nora noticed her first as a movement beyond the glass, then as a face which stayed. She was looking at the cabinet. Nora waited, absurdly shy. She had spent years taking her work into other people's homes, where it became theirs almost before she had finished. Someone looking from the street was different. She had found them without an introduction.
The woman glanced up at the unfinished lettering over the door, then tried the handle.
Nora opened it.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “Are you open?”
“Not quite.”
“I thought you might be. I've walked past every day.”
“You can come in.”
The woman hesitated at the paper on the glass.
“It's fine,” Nora said. “Watch the cable.”
She moved it aside with her foot. The woman came in, carrying a shopping bag against her chest. She was older than Nora, perhaps by ten years, wearing running shoes under a long coat. Nothing about her looked like the people Nora had imagined for the opening. That made her welcome more exciting.
“That one's yours?” the woman asked.
“Made by Mina Patel,” Nora said. “She's here.”
Mina reappeared from the back room. Nora introduced them, and watched her friend become briefly formal at the sound of her full name. The woman asked whether the cabinet came in other sizes. Mina asked what she wanted to put inside.
“That's the trouble. Everything. At the moment it's all in different places, and none of the places are good.”
She described a room with a piano no one played, a television she didn't want to look at but watched every evening, and doors which opened where furniture ought to be.
“You could send us a photograph,” Nora said.
“You'd be appalled.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I would. I am. I go in there and I think, why does it look as if we've just moved in? We've been there seventeen years.”
Nora knew that frustration. She liked the woman for admitting it without a photograph made flattering first.
“The room's trying to do too many things at once,” she said. “We can look at how you use it.”
The woman began to explain where the piano stood. Nora listened, asked about the light, drew a quick rectangle on the back of a delivery note. As she worked, the woman set her shopping down.
Cal came out and stopped at the edge of the conversation. He was holding a cloth. Nora glanced up, wanting him to see this, wanting him to know that all his work had already brought someone through the door.
He smiled.
Nora asked if she could take a photograph for the showroom, and the woman agreed. Mina rested a hand on the cabinet's door edge beside her. Nora raised her phone with her good hand and caught Cal smiling in the background.
The woman gave Mina her email address and took one of Nora's cards. At the threshold she looked back.
“When do you open properly?”
“Soon,” Nora said.
It had sounded flimsy when she said it to Bell. Now it sounded like a promise someone might return for.
After the woman left, Mina stood by her cabinet with the email written on the delivery note.
“She'll want a price before she wants anything else.”
“She wants the room,” Nora said. “She doesn't know how to get it yet.”
“You can do that bit.”
Nora heard the offer beneath the reserve. They could still work together. Mina had not forgotten the kitchen, or decided Nora's answers were enough. She was here, and there was something worth doing.
Cal switched on the concealed light. The wall warmed, the shelf rose clear of its shadow, and Nora saw the room complete for the first time.
“I can change that if you hate it,” he said.
“Don't.”
She went toward him. Her arm stopped her embracing him the way she wanted, so she put her good hand on his cheek. He leaned into it for an instant, then kissed her palm and stepped away before Mina could comment.
Nora stood looking at the light he'd made for her with money none of them had earned. She had known it was stolen when she chose it. The light did not look different now that a woman had walked through the door.
“Keep going,” she said.
Cal put the cloth down. Mina opened the cabinet again, checking the tray for dust. Nora picked up the delivery note and wrote the woman's name carefully above the room she had drawn.