Turn 7 of 13

Go back downstairs to Rae before she reaches you

You meet her on the first half-landing, where the stairs turn and the window lets in a wedge of grey morning light. She's taken the steps two at a time, dressing gown flapping, and when she sees you she stops with her hand on the railing and exhales hard through her nose.

"Sam. What the hell."

"I couldn't get in," you say, and the sentence comes out wrong — not curved away this time but too plain, too bare, a key that fits but opens the wrong room. You hold up the key.

"My hand wouldn't turn it. I stood there and I couldn't — my hand just stopped."

Rae looks at the key, then at your face. She reaches out and takes your wrist, not gently, and turns your hand over. Your palm is red where the key's teeth pressed in. She looks at the marks for a long time.

"Come back downstairs," she says.

You follow her. Your legs feel uncertain, not weak but unfamiliar, like you're operating them at one remove. The phone buzzes again in your other hand — the forum notification, or the email, you can't tell, and you don't look. Rae holds her door open and you pass through it and the flat is the same as it was ten minutes ago — the cooling tea, the silent television, her book facedown on the arm of the chair — but it feels different now. It feels like a room that hasn't been prepared for you.

"Sit," Rae says, and points at the sofa, and you sit, and the fact that you obey her feels different from the way you obey the recording. Her instruction has no weight behind it, no warmth at the back of your neck. It's just a word and you choose it. You choose it and the choosing feels like something you'd forgotten how to do.

Rae pulls the armchair closer and sits across from you, elbows on her knees.

"Tell me everything. From the start. The course, the recordings, the mirror. All of it."