She bikes back along the canal to Hackney in the summer sunshine, and packs up the flat into boxes, which she loads into a rental van and drives to a storage facility on the North Circular. She goes back to the flat and cleans the oven, washes the windows. Has a last cigarette on the wide stone steps. She puts the key through the mailbox of the house of the estate agent in Stamford Hill, then she takes a taxi to Tufnell Park with three small bags of her stuff.

She moves into the attic, where she sleeps on a futon on the floor. She likes it up here, though it is hot at this time of year, at the top of the house. The old chair is still here, and she sits in it and reads, while Sarah sleeps downstairs. She roams her mother’s bookshelves, reading at random—Carson McCullers, Zola, Katherine Mansfield. Many of the books have her mother’s notes in them; some from her time as a teacher, some from earlier, from her university degree. There is something moving about reading like this, alongside her mother, feeling the youthful energy in her mother’s scrawl, keeping her company while she sleeps downstairs.

One afternoon, as she sits there reading, an idea comes to her, a surprising one, and she lets it settle in her body, feeling its contours, trying it out for size.

In the early mornings she takes the battered old hose and douses the garden—It must be early when it’s hot like this, Sarah tells her, so their leaves don’t burn. Lissa stands in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden inhaling the musky tang of the tomatoes and green growing things, and looks up at the house, at Sarah’s bedroom, where the curtains are still drawn and her mother sleeps. She takes the same route around the garden, giving the plants a drink from the old hose. She is starting to have her favorites: the lady’s mantle, which cups the water like mercury; the sweet peas, racing up their trellis. Sometimes she bends and takes the tendrils in her fingers and strokes the ends of them, watching them reach out for life. She attempts to cut the lawn with the ancient mower, whose teeth are rusted and saw at the grass.

In the long light evenings, they sit in Sarah’s room and read to her. She loves to be read to; poetry mostly—more bang for the buck, she says, no time for The Brothers Karamazov now. She sends Lissa and Laurie to the bookshelves over and over again—knows where each book stands on the crowded shelves, knows its neighbors, can direct you to a volume in the dark. She treats poems like medicine and knows what she needs.