That night, after B and E had fallen asleep, I scrubbed my face, and cleaned up the wreckage in the bathroom, all the ruined tubes, the lipsticks, the tiny blush boxes. I picked up too, the whole apartment. Starting in one room and moving through all the others slowly. Our games had taken over the place a bit. Crept up on us, encroached. I hadn’t noticed. Or I had noticed and had let myself loose, had tried to, as if I were glossy green leaves floating in water and could be beautiful and delicate and wavering and touched just here and here, just dappled maybe in the right light. But now, cleaning, I saw it. The mess, the games, the importance of not wavering.

There was the egg carton on the counter, split open with the shells all jumbled up inside it, the cups and dishes from the tea party we’d had on the floor. There were the bits and bobs we’d brought in from the park and stowed in E’s bed. The sticks and apple cores. The secrets. The treasures. The wooden music box we’d found by the bins, that E had loved and that we’d brought back with us, dancing into the apartment, and that I now saw was speckled at the joints with mould. The doll we’d found in the sandbox with the broken neck. I filled bag after bag with the remnants of our marvellous games. The lemons in the guest room had rotted spectacularly, they turned almost to dust in my hands. I took the bags out of the apartment two by two, to the bins, making many trips until the apartment was clean again and ready for us all to love each other better, ready for us all to love each other so much.

After my last trip, on my way back to the apartment, I saw the woman with the pinned white hair sitting outside the cafe drinking coffee. She wore the same long coat, even in the heat, the buttons done up, right up to her neck. Her polished change lay already counted, arranged on the tabletop next to her saucer. Her feet were crossed, as before, at the ankles, tucked underneath her chair as if making space for someone else to come and sit across from her.

She was dipping the corner of her napkin into the tea-light on the table, letting the flame catch and tapping it out again with her fingers. Reflexively almost, over and over, lighting it, snuffing it out. There was only a moment, each time in between lighting and snuffing, for the tiny flame to live, for it to be alive.

I took two steps towards her, I really did. Thinking maybe in my tiredness that she had arranged all this somehow, for me. Thinking that she was signalling me. Hi, I would say, Bonsoir. We would have interesting things to say to each other. She would tell me about some wild thing she’d done when she was young. Some train that she’d ridden on in Russia, where the air was so cold outside that all the beautiful people inside the ice-covered carriages had to spend the whole night kissing and touching each other to stay warm. Something like that.