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.

The bell dinged at the counter. Petra showed the shelf of hand-shaped wabi sabi tableware to the dour woman in a slumping grey everyday coat before walking behind the counter and bringing up the daily banking sheet. Suki was perched on a display table like an emo-themed centrepiece, reading a comic – My Solo Exchange Diary, by the looks of it. Apart from the wabi sabi woman, there were no customers downstairs but the CCTV showed four upstairs – a man and a woman together, a woman alone, and a single man. Petra didn’t remember the singletons coming in. The customer heat map she kept in her head was generally pretty accurate – not a particularly taxing skill at Needful Things.