Turn 2 of 13

Remove both gloves and put this aside

You work the buttons at your left wrist with your teeth, the way you might have done as a child dressing alone. The kid leather releases you reluctantly, leaving a faint line of warmth where it pressed against your pulse. You set both gloves on the bedside table, the left slightly curled as if remembering your hand, the right still stiff with disuse.

The rose-coloured blouse remains where you laid it, and you find you cannot look at it directly. Instead you cross to the window and stand before your great-aunt's photograph. Vivienne's hands are folded, you notice again, but now you see how the fingers interlace, the right thumb resting atop the left in a gesture that feels deliberate, posed. You try to replicate it with your own hands and find the arrangement strange, uncomfortable, as if your joints bend in a different order than hers.

Your phone buzzes once more, and this time you answer.

"I'm not selling," you say, before Ronan can finish his greeting.

A pause on the line, the sound of him lighting a cigarette.

"Nora. The house is eating money you don't have."

"There's something here." You watch your bare hands on the windowsill, the left one still carrying a faint impression of the glove's seam along its edge.

"Something about Vivienne. You never told me she changed."

Another pause, longer. When he speaks again his voice has gone careful, the way it does when he speaks of your mother.

"She wore things that didn't suit her. For years. And then they did." He exhales smoke.

"Take the money, Nora. Don't try to understand it."

You end the call without promising anything. The gloves wait on the table. The blouse waits on the bed. You stand between them, feeling the morning pass through you, knowing that patience is the only way this works and wondering if you have enough of it, or too much.