Her cheeks heat, giving away her morbid thoughts. Her voice, when she finds it, is cracked, as unrecognizable as her reflection. “Ed-na?”

Edna continues to read.

“Would you stay? Do you think?”

Edna fails to look up.

Lily takes another savage tug with the brush and explains: “Here in the cottage, I mean. I’m not sure I would, not on my own.”

“Hmm?” says Edna, her eyes still fixed on the page. “What’s this?”

Lily swallows; her throat feels swollen and dry, but she forces herself to go on. “I was just wondering, that’s all. I mean—if it is me that goes first—would you want to stay here? In the cottage? I can’t imagine you’d want to go back . . .” She hesitates. Edna only ever refers to it as that place, but it seems important somehow to give it its full name, to try, as they come to this point so near to the end, to be honest with each other. “To the hospice,” she says, quickly adding, “Of course, there might be other options we could look at?”

Edna finally looks up, frowns at her, and uses a crippled finger to mark her place in the pages. She stares at Lily for a moment and then sighs, a long blast of irritated air. “Oh, Lillian.” (Only Edna calls her Lillian, and her mother, of course.) She shakes her head. “Do hurry up and come to bed,” she says, and returns to her book.

Lily resumes her brushing. Another face appears in the mirror, conjured by her thoughts, perhaps. Lily’s mother stands behind her and takes the brush from her hands just as she used to so many years before. One hundred strokes before bedtime; far fewer needed now. “Stop your fidgeting!” her mother would say in much the same tone Edna uses now. And “Oh, Lillian.” Yes, she used to say that, too. “Oh, Lillian, why are you headed to London when every sensible person is moving away? Don’t you know what sort of people they have down there?”