Chapter 21: Vera, 1962, Unlocked

She wakes at half past three in the afternoon, which is late even for her, and lies still for a moment in the particular quality of winter light that means the sun is already beginning to leave.

The ceiling has a water stain that has been there since before she arrived. She has looked at it three thousand times or more since moving into this flat, in the way one looks at a familiar imperfection — not seeing it, exactly, but knowing it is there in the same way one knows a scar by its shape without looking down. Today it looks different. Today it looks like a map of something.

She does not move for four minutes. She is aware of the flat around her in the way she is always aware of the flat, its sounds and silences and the particular acoustic quality of a building that has been standing for a hundred and forty years, the way old buildings develop a characteristic silence the way old people develop a characteristic stillness. She can hear Callum's absence. He has been gone since early morning — his absence has a texture, a shape of negative space in the flat's composition that she has grown accustomed to, the way one grows accustomed to the sound of a clock and notices only when it stops.