First, Actually

June’s flat, morning

Wren woke on a sofa that wasn’t hers, under a blanket that wasn’t hers, and remembered all of it at once.

That was the thing about not being that drunk. She’d been drunk enough to walk across the city and say it, and not drunk enough to be spared any of it.

She lay very still, working out how quickly a person can leave a flat.

There was a smell of toast. There was a radio on somewhere, low.

She sat up. Her coat was folded over the arm of the chair, which meant somebody had taken it off her, which meant she’d let them.

“There’s tea,” June said from the kitchen. “It’s bad. I’ve made it wrong again.”

Wren put her feet on the floor.

“Going to go,” she said.

“You can. There’s a bus at the end of the road and I’m not going to stand in front of the door.” June came in with two mugs and put one on the low table. “I’d like a few minutes first.”

“June.”

“A few minutes. Then the bus.”

She sat down in the chair opposite, not next to her, which Wren noticed and was grateful for and could not have said why.

“Last night was not a mistake,” June said. “That’s the first thing and I want it out of the way, because I know you’ve been lying there working out how to make it into one.”

Wren looked at the mug.

“Second thing,” June said. “I stopped for the reason I gave you. Not another one. There’s no polite version underneath it.”

“You don’t have to—“

“I know I don’t have to.” June wrapped both hands round her tea. “Third thing is the one I’ve been not saying for a long time, and it’s going to be horrible, and I’d like you to let me get to the end of it.”

Wren felt something go cold in her chest.

“That night in the systems room,” June said. “You were right. I wasn’t asleep.”

The radio played on in the kitchen.

“I went under for a bit, early on. Then I came back up when you put the coat over me.” June’s voice was completely level and her hands were not. “And I understood that if I moved, you’d apologise and never come near me again. So I kept my eyes shut and let you say all of it.”

Wren didn’t move.

“Every word. Your mother. The seven years. You asking me not to wake up.”

Wren did not move.

“And then I went down to my car and sat in it,” June said, “and told myself I’d done you a kindness. And I did that because I still needed you to get me something, and I have never been able to look at those two facts in the same minute until quite recently.”

“Why are you telling me this.”

“Because you worked it out on your own, and then stood in my hallway and told me you weren’t going to make me say it.” June put her tea down. “You gave me a way out. You’ve done that every single time since we were children, and I have taken every single one.”

She looked up.

“So no. You get it said properly. I was awake. I heard all of it. And I let you walk out of that room believing you’d got away with it.”

Wren sat on the sofa in yesterday’s shirt with her hands hanging between her knees.

She had run this. Not this — she had run every version of the moment where June found out, for seven years, and in all of them there was a softness at the end and June being kind, and then Wren leaving the building.

Nobody had been kind. June had just told her the worst thing about herself and left it on the table.

“That’s the whole of it,” June said. “That’s everything I’ve got that you didn’t know.”

She stood up and took her mug to the kitchen.

“I’m not going to explain it and I’m not going to ask you for anything. If you want the bus, the bus is there.”

Wren picked up the tea.

It was terrible. Far too much milk.

“You always make it like this,” she said.

---

Six weeks

Nothing got fixed. It’s worth being clear about that.

Her father went in on a Tuesday. Wren drove him there, because he asked her to and because there was nobody else, and they didn’t talk much on the way.

At the gate he took her hand in both of his and said her mother’s name, and then he went in.

The flat stayed a flat. She moved back into it, because rent is rent, and she did not sit in the good chair and did not move it either.

Roland Haas was in a legal process that would take years and would probably end in an amount of money he could pay.

June kept the deposits in a separate account and did not spend any of them. She told Wren she had no idea what she was going to do about that. Wren said don’t decide yet, and neither of them mentioned it again.

Some things did happen. Wren got her hair cut, short, because she’d been meaning to for a year and had never had a free Saturday. She sold her father’s car and kept the small one, and the first thing she did with it was move the mirror, because it had been set for a taller man since before she could drive.

She and June saw each other. Not a lot. Coffee, once a walk, a message about nothing that got answered in the middle of a Wednesday.

She stopped putting her phone face-down. That took longer than the haircut.

---

The Kovač flat, a Friday

June came over with a bag of food from a garage, which had become a joke neither of them explained.

They ate at the small table in the small kitchen, where the kettle still had a burn on the base and the cupboard door was still held on with the wrong screws.

“I’ve been offered the Hallow account permanently,” June said. “It’s more money. Beckmann said the words stability and narrative in the same sentence and I had to look at the carpet.”

“Are you taking it?”

June turned her glass on the table before she answered, which she did now instead of turning a ring.

“Probably. It’s a good job and I’m good at it and I’ve stopped needing it to mean anything.” She turned her glass. “That’s most of my news. It’s not very dramatic news.”

“Good.”

“Yes,” June said. “I thought so too.”

Afterwards Wren washed up, because it was her flat, and June dried, because she was the guest.

Halfway through it Wren noticed that she had not rolled her sleeves back.

She had done it at this sink since she was a child. In the Alcántara kitchen. At a hospital counter. In the systems room in the middle of the night, and on the landing outside this door with the key in her hand.

Before you touch something that isn’t yours to break.

She stood there with her cuffs in the water and let them get wet.

They got to the end of the plates, and there was nothing left to do with their hands.

June put the tea towel down.

“I’m going to say the thing now,” she said.

“Which thing?”

“I’m staying. That’s it. That’s the whole sentence — no reasons after it, nothing for you to be polite about.” She looked at her. “You decide.”

Wren stood in her own kitchen with the tap dripping the way it always had.

Seven years, and she had built a rule out of it.

That what she felt was hers and had to stay that way. That people like her held things and didn’t hand them over. That the moment she said it out loud, she’d lose everything on both sides of the sentence.

She’d said it three times now. To a woman asleep. To a woman in a corridor with beer in her. And now, here, in daylight, with nothing in her at all.

She hadn’t lost anything.

“Come here,” Wren said.

---

In the morning June was still there.

Wren woke first, which never happened, and lay in the grey light listening to a tram go past at the end of the road, and the gulls over the roofs, and the tap, and somebody breathing next to her.

She thought about getting up and making the tea properly, the way it should be made, and putting it on the side where June would find it.

Then she decided not to move at all for a while.