The mug was still on the draining board when she arrived, face-down on the rubber mat as if it had just been washed. Her mother had been gone six weeks.

She didn't move it. She set her bag on the chair inside the door and stood for a moment, listening to nothing in particular. Then she opened the back door to let the afternoon in—that particular late-August stillness, the air carrying the smell of grass and something almost cool underneath, as if September were waiting just off the property.

The kitchen was smaller than she remembered, or she had grown into the kind of person who filled rooms. She opened the fridge from habit and found a jar of pickle and a bottle of tonic, both nearly empty. On the door, a magnet shaped like a sunflower held a note in her mother's handwriting: milk, the good biscuits, call D before Thursday.

She didn't know who D was. She read the note three times.

Then she closed the fridge and sat down in her chair—the one with the loose rung her mother had repaired twice with the wrong kind of glue—and let the afternoon move around her. Next door's cat crossed the garden wall and disappeared into the elder at the back.

At some point she realized she was holding the sunflower magnet. She didn't remember picking it up. It was lighter than it looked, and when she pressed it back to the fridge it only half-caught, then slid two inches and stopped.

She left it where it landed.

On the way out she paused at the draining board. The mug was plain white, chipped at the rim from some collision she'd never witnessed. She thought she ought to take it. But she didn't, and she thought about that later—on the train, and then at home, and then in her own kitchen at midnight when she couldn't sleep and the kettle was doing its slow climb toward the boil, the small light above the hob the only light on in the house.

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