Turn 5 of 11

Change the subject — ask about her week, the bread, anything ordinary

"So what's with the bread?" you say, and you hear your own voice lurch into the question a beat too fast, the way someone changes the subject in a film when the audience is supposed to notice. Tamsin clocks it — of course she does — but she lets you have it, because that is the deal she just made. She told you to tell her before it eats you alive, and in exchange she is giving you this afternoon to not do that.

"Sourdough with cardamom," she says, pulling another piece off the loaf and inspecting the crumb with the critical eye of someone who has been baking long enough to have opinions about holes. "I found a starter on Gumtree. Woman in Clapham was giving it away because she's moving to Lisbon. I've named her Brenda."

"You named your starter."

"She's a living thing, Wren. She requires care and attention. She has a personality." Tamsin tears her bread in half and offers you the bigger piece, which is such a Tamsin gesture — generosity presented as practicality — that you take it without thinking.

"Brenda is temperamental and she doesn't like tap water. She's basically you."

You laugh again, and this time it comes easier. The kitchen is warm and the bread is good and your sister is standing next to you being herself, and for a full thirty seconds you don't look at her tags. You let the moment be ordinary. You let yourself stand in it the way you used to stand in things before a Tuesday morning in your flat when you opened your eyes and the world had sprouted labels.

"How was the rest of your week?" you ask.

"Besides acquiring a yeast culture from Gumtree, which — by the way — is the most you sentence I've ever heard."

Tamsin chews, considers, swallows. She tells you about a project at work that got bumped to next quarter, about a colleague who keeps scheduling meetings at 4:45 on Fridays, about the woman in the flat below hers who has started playing violin at seven in the morning. She talks the way she always talks — quick, dry, the details arranged for maximum comedic effect — and you listen and eat bread and let the ordinary settle over you like a blanket. But underneath it, quiet and constant, the tag thinks-you-resent-her hangs in your peripheral vision like a word written on the inside of your eyelids, and the fragments H, 7, K are still there, getting softer, and you know that when you leave this kitchen the question of who put it there will still be waiting.