The kettle clicks off at half seven, and the sound is so ordinary it almost hurts. My mother pours two cups without asking whether I want one, because in this house, tea is not a question but a constitutional right.
"Did you sleep?" She sets the mug in front of me, her eyes doing the scan she thinks I don't notice—face, hands, midsection, back to face.
"Enough." A generous interpretation of the four hours I spent staring at the ceiling fan while a wedding assembled itself across the city. "Your garden's gone feral, by the way. I could see it from the window."
"Your father's been tending it." She says tending the way other people say committing arson. "He bought a new hose attachment with seven settings, and he's used one to drown everything and another to create a targeted flood."
"So he's thriving." I wrap both hands around the mug, and the heat travels into my wrists, settling somewhere behind my sternum. My mother pushes the toast rack toward me, and the small scrape of ceramic on wood is the most peaceful sound I have heard in months.
"Jam or honey?" She holds up both jars with the gravity of a woman presenting evidence in court.
"Jam. Always jam." I reach for the jar, and she pulls it back an inch.
"Honey is better for you. Antioxidants, enzymes, general superiority." She unscrews the lid and sets it beside my plate, easy and confident. "Jam is just sugar wearing a fruit costume."
"That's the most offensive thing you've ever said to me, and you once told me my prom dress looked like a curtain." I take the jam anyway, and she shakes her head, and neither of us mentions what day it is, because my mother understands that some silences are a form of surgery. “Besides, why did you give me a choice anyway?”
She shrugs and doesn’t respond. After breakfast, around half ten, she leaves for the shops, squeezing my shoulder on the way out. The door clicks, and the house exhales, and I am alone with the ticking clock and a kitchen that smells like toast and a childhood I can no longer access without bleeding.
I pick up the phone before I can talk myself out of it. Callum answers on the third ring, and his voice arrives like a window cracking open in a sealed room.
"Morning. You're up early for someone with nowhere to be." There's noise behind him—fiddle music, someone laughing, the clatter of plates.
"Where are you? It sounds like a barn raising." I pull my feet onto the chair and tuck my knees against my chest.
"My cousin Ewan's. He dragged me to a ceilidh last night, and I'm paying the price." He pauses, and I hear him swallow something. "I danced with a seventy-four-year-old woman named Margaret for two and a half hours. She led. I did not complain."
A laugh escapes me, startling in the quiet kitchen. It pushes something wide open in my chest, and the ache behind it is immediate—missing him so sharply the air leaves my lungs and doesn't come back.
"Margaret sounds like she has her life figured out." My voice is steadier than it should be, and Callum hears the gap anyway, because Callum always hears the gaps.
"Told me I needed a haircut and a woman who'd feed me properly." A beat. "I told her I had the haircut covered."
My throat closes. The fiddle music fades behind him, and I hear a door shut, and his voice comes closer now, quieter. "Are you coming back?" The question leaves me without clearance.
"I don't know yet." No performance in it, no deflection. "Are you all right?"
"I'm sitting in my mother's kitchen." I trace a crack in the table with my thumbnail, the same crack from a vase Celine knocked off when we were nine. "Not going to my sister's wedding. So, you know. Thriving."
"That sounds like a very specific kind of torture." I can almost hear him rearranging his mouth around several worse responses before settling on the safest one.
"I'm fine." The word fine has never been flimsier.
"Eat something. And stop writing lists." His voice sharpens into the firmness he reserves for when he knows I'm lying and cares too much to call it properly.
I close my eyes. My fingers press the phone harder against my ear, as if the pressure can shrink four hundred miles into something survivable.
"I'll call you later," he says, and the gentleness in it could split me open if I let it.
"Okay." The line goes dead, and I sit with the phone warm in my lap, and the kitchen is quieter now than before I called, which shouldn't be possible but is.
I last eleven minutes before sitting still becomes a version of drowning. My legs carry me without instructions—past the landing, past the bathroom with too many towels, past the framed school photos where Celine and I wear matching braids and identical smiles that meant very different things.
Celine's old bedroom. The door is ajar. I should keep walking, but my hand is already pushing it wider.
The room exhales stale perfume and something sharper—hairspray, the chemical sweetness of fresh makeup. A dress bag hangs from the wardrobe handle, and ivory heels sit paired by the door. She's been staying here, getting ready here, in our mother's house, ten feet from where I slept.
I sit on the bed because my knees have stopped cooperating. The wardrobe door is cracked open, and I reach to close it—a reflex, muscle memory from a childhood spent under mum’s voice saying “Don’t leave the closets open!”—and my hand stops.
Top shelf. Behind a stack of old jumpers. A shoebox-sized box, the cardboard soft at the corners from years of handling.
I pull it down. The lid comes off, and my skin goes cold from the wrists up, spreading across my arms and settling at the base of my skull like ice water poured down my spine.
My university sweater—the grey one that disappeared from a house party in third year. Gold earrings I tore apart two drawers looking for after Celine's birthday dinner, a silk scarf I left at a restaurant and mourned for a week, a tortoiseshell hair clip I blamed on a gym locker.
Not worn, not borrowed. Each item folded the way I fold things—sleeves tucked, edges aligned—placed with a care that makes my hands shake, because this is not a sister's borrowing. This is a museum, a private exhibition of a person Celine has been assembling, piece by piece, for thirty years.
My chest folds. I press my palm over my mouth because the sound trying to climb out of me is something without a name and without a bottom, and if I let it loose in this room it will never stop.
My fingers move through the layers—a bracelet, a photograph, a tube of my lipstick stain still sealed in its packaging. Then at the very bottom, where there’s nothing else but cardboard, my fingers find an envelope.