Cat's hand stops on the cupboard door.
"When?"
"Tuesday. Day two." I get the mugs down. "She's had my things put in storage. She's spoken to Richard Chen. My old job's being held for me. All I have to do is get on a plane and leave you here."
Cat has gone very white.
"What did you tell her?"
"Nothing." I turn around. "I read two lines and deleted it. And then I sat on that bed and cried — and do you want to know what I cried about?"
She shakes her head.
"Not the job," I say. "Not the flat. Not my mother." I put the mug into her hands. "I cried because you weren't outside that door."
Cat sets it on the counter very carefully, the way you do when you can't trust your hands.
"On the worst day," I say. "With an actual exit on the table. With my heart in pieces because ofyou.And I didn't want to leave. Iwanted you to knock." I shrug, and it comes out crooked. "That isn't a phase, Cat. That's the least confused I have ever been about anything in my life."
It's nearly two in the morning when I find her in the sitting room, standing at the mantelpiece with the photograph in her hands.
Marguerite and Hélène. A village hall. Six people and a very poor cake.
"You moved this," I say.
"Four times."
"Why?"
Cat doesn't answer for a while. She just looks at it — at those two women, at their absurd triumphant faces, at thirty-three years finally getting its paperwork.
"Because I want it," she says.
I go very still.
"That's what set me off. Not the letter. Not the ninety days." Her voice is barely there. "That. Two women who got tokeepit. And I looked at it and I wanted it so badly I couldn't breathe — and the last time I wanted something that much I was twelve years old and I lost it. So I—" She stops. Swallows. "So I started packing."
"Cat."
"I'm not asking you," she says quickly. "I've got no right to ask you anything tonight. I only wanted you to know what it was. That it was never that I didn't want you." She sets the photograph back on the mantel, square in the middle, exactlywhere it's been all along. "It's that I want you so much it frightens the life out of me."
I come and stand beside her. I look at my grandmother, who waited thirty-three years for a village hall and a bad cake.
Then I take Cat's hand.
"Then we'd better get on with it," I say. "We haven't got thirty-three years to waste."
Cat lets out a breath that's half a laugh.
We stand there in the dark for a long while, the two of us, in front of a photograph of two women who managed it.
Nothing is fixed. She'll be frightened again. So will I.
But she knocked.
That's where you start.
30
