The face that stared impassively at her from the black mirror was younger than Ida’s but also far more ravaged. Her eyes were puffed with grief – the same swollen eyes that she’d seen the other night, downstairs in the lobby. This was the same woman looking back at her now. The smirk was plainly plastered across her mouth, as a black tear drained from one of those empty sockets.

Petra scurried into the kitchen to shove the tray onto the countertop and try to remember how to breathe, before she would rush back out again to confront the false apparition. For what? For posing as her mother’s friend? For looking fine when she was really brutalised? What the hell was happening? But when she got back to the sitting room, the clouds had obscured the sun again and the reflection was gone, and Ida’s voice sounded as it had all morning.

‘You alright, love?’

‘Yeah,’ Petra started, rounding the back of Ida’s chair to get to the couch.

Ida pushed back the loose tendrils of her hair from her face and gathered it back behind her ears, collecting it and repositioning her ponytail. ‘This weather, it makes my hair insane.’ Holding her hair with her left hand, she fished in the handbag at her feet for a barrette and clipped her hair back tidily. The barrette was covered in rose velvet.

Ida turned, looking over her shoulder to where Petra was immobilised. She smiled. One top incisor was missing and the other was shattered diagonally, and there was blood behind her lower lip.

The light shifted.

No, not blood – a smear of lipstick.

Not a broken tooth – a raisin stuck in her teeth.

Pull yourself together, Petra.

15 Petra stepped back from the shop window with a satisfied sigh. Her shoulders and forearms were aching, but in a good, distracting way. Cleaning a massive window was not something she would have chosen as therapy, but it had done the job on this unseasonably mild day – she hadn’t thought ugly thoughts for almost an hour.

She watched the streaks of the window cleaner evaporate. Now the glass reflected the sunlit buildings across the road with mirror-like clarity. A chubby wood pigeon flumped down on the ledge above the window, fluffing out its butt feathers, and Petra turned her back and picked up the bucket, rags and the spray bottle and went inside. Nature would be nature, the cycles of maintenance would recur, and she would let it go. There was no point in trying to control what she couldn’t control. She was feeling somewhat relaxed for the first time in a while.

In the back she washed her hands, poured the dregs of cold coffee and microwaved it. She flexed her feet in her boots; all morning they’d been feeling uncomfortable – sweaty and grainy in her socks, sticky almost, as if she hadn’t dried them properly after showering. On the walk to the shop from Helena’s flat, something in there had been chafing, her but she hadn’t bothered to stop on the pavement and unlace her boots to shake out the grit that was caught in there. But now, if anything, it felt like there was even more grit than before.