Edna is staring at her from the mirror. She has put down her book on the bedside table and removed her spectacles, which now lie folded in the palm of her hand. “It happened again, didn’t it?”

“Oh, Edna, don’t fuss.”

“But you were miles away! It was as though you weren’t here in the room with me at all.” Edna’s face evokes nothing but its usual authoritative calm, but Lily knows her better than this; Edna is worried. “Will you please go back to the doctor? Have you even taken your warfarin today? When’s your next checkup?”

Lily ignores her. She knows Edna’s relentless questioning is only born out of love and concern, but she is so sick of doctors and medicines and checkups! She puts down the brush on the dressing table. “I’m finished now. Let’s just get to sleep. Things always seem better in the morning.” She stops, but Edna is too shrewd not to notice such a slip-up. She meets Edna’s eyes. They make her think of hard, shiny conkers and the rapping of cold, raw knuckles.

Edna raises one eyebrow. “What ‘things’?”

Lily filibusters, arranging items on the dressing table as though curating a shopwindow display. “Oh, everything. And nothing. You know. Are you finished with the light?”

The ghost of Lily’s mother is shaking her head, her lips tight. Such a disappointment! But then Edna grunts and clearly decides to let it go. She pats herself down and folds the sheets around her bulky body. She is no doubt tired, which was largely the reason Lily picked this moment to try to tell her. Edna is easier to deal with when she doesn’t have much fight in her. So why hasn’t she told her? Well, it’s too late now.

Lily lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and watches her mother slide back into the woodchip on the walls. She gets up and pads barefoot between the beds, enjoying the scratch of the nylon carpet between her toes. By the time she reaches for the lamp, Edna is nestled beneath blanket and sheet. As she turns away, Lily sees the small square indentations Edna’s hairnet has left on her pillowslip. She decides not to bother with her own and pushes the switch under the shade, the hot metal pinching the loose skin on her thumb.

“You’ll regret it in the morning,” says a voice, and Lily is no longer sure if it’s Edna’s, or her mother’s, or someone else entirely. She climbs into bed, trying as she did as a child to slip between the sheets without bunching her nightdress. Slowly her eyes adjust to the dark. Beyond the bedside table a lump of crinkled bed linen refuses to look in her direction.

“Edna?” she calls softly.

Silence.

“Edna?”

“What’s the matter?”