Vee watches the light at the edges of her window, tries to see it thickening and growing. But its creeping is too clever, like the creeping of the growth in her brain, too easily dismissed as nothing until it was undeniably and irrevocably something. Something unstoppable. While she waits, she tries to remember what it is about today. She is doing something today. Something for Leonie. Except it can’t be, because Leonie’s dead. Is it too much to hope for headaches then death, without the blindness or the jumbling of past and present? Vee has got used to living without what she lost after the surgery a decade ago. The older she gets, the less relevant those memories feel, though at the time she had mourned for every lost one of them, and their lack had made her feel unstable, uncertain, shaky on her feet.

*

The knock comes at nine-thirty.

‘Morning,’ Erica says, with a broad, lipsticked smile and a coiled up energy that makes Vee almost glad she has lived alone for all of these years. Other people are just so tiring, closeup. Even if you aren’t ill. They always want something: conversation, help, company, praise. Compromise. ‘All set?’

‘For what?’

The smile pauses. ‘The march?’

Oh, Christ on a bike. This is what today was about. Vee sits down on the sofa, the small warm space that she made in the night. ‘I’m not well.’

‘A headache, again?’

‘Yes, a headache.’

And there’s a new sort of pain, too. Missing Leonie has become visceral, again, with Erica so close by.

‘I’ve got painkillers in the car.’ Erica sighs, as though trying not quite as hard as she should to hide her annoyance; letting the edges of it glisten. (Was it always this much of an effort, with people? It’s so trying, to interpret, to interact.) Then she adds, ‘I had to arrange childcare.’

Vee considers letting this go, but then she imagines what Leonie would say: ‘Why does that make it worse? Couldn’t you just be angry on your own behalf? You’re a person. You’re entitled to feel—’ Oh, if only the words would come, more easily than they do. ‘Pissed.’ No, that’s not quite right. ‘. . . off. Pissed off.’

Erica acts as though she hasn’t heard, ‘I don’t want to go on my own. I want to see what you see. Your perspective?’