"Mollie."

Just her name. The way he said it, it was not a question, not a greeting. It was like a confirmation. Mollie. As if he'd been waiting for this call without knowing he was waiting. As if her name on his screen at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon was not a surprise but an arrival.

She couldn't speak. The breath was still wrong. The bathroom was too bright and the fluorescent light was humming at a frequency that lived inside her skull and she was holding the phone to her ear and she couldn't speak.

He didn't say are you okay.

She would remember this later. She would remember it in the flat, in the dark, standing in front of the painting on her wall, and she would think: he didn't ask if I was okay. Anyone else would have asked. Anyone else would have said the thing people say when they hear someone breathing wrong on the other end of a phone. He didn't ask because he already knew the answer and the answer didn't matter and the question would have required her to perform and he had told her, once, in a diner, to stop performing.

He said: "Tell me what you see."

Five words. It was quiet and steady. It was the voice of a man who looked at things for a living and understood that seeing was sometimes the only thing that kept you attached to the world.

She opened her eyes. She hadn't realized she'd closed them.

"Tiles," she said. Her voice was wrong. Thin. A version of her voice she didn't recognize. "White tiles. Bathroom. Staff bathroom. They're the small ones. Square. There's grout between them. Some of the grout is grey and some is... it's yellowed. Near the sink."

"Keep going."

"The light is fluorescent. It's... it hums. It's the kind that makes everyone look dead, which is ironic because I work in a..." She stopped. Breathed. "There's a mirror. It's got a crack. Upper left to the middle. Like someone hit it or it just... decided to break. On its own."

"What else."

"An industrial soap dispenser. The soap is pink. It smells like... nothing. It smells like a place that's supposed to be clean. There's a paper towel on the floor. Someone missed the bin. My hands are on the sink. The sink is white. The tap is the kind you push down and it runs for ten seconds and then stops, like it's rationing water. Like it doesn't trust you."

She heard him breathe. Not a sigh. Not a sound of concern. Just breath. In. Out. The rhythm steady, deliberate, and she realized what he was doing: he was breathing at a pace and she was matching it. Her lungs were following his lungs the way her eyes followed his brushstrokes... instinctively, without deciding to.

"The floor," he said. "What's the floor."

"Linoleum. Grey. The kind that looks clean even when it isn't. There's a scuff mark near the door. Black. Someone's shoe."

"Touch the tiles."

She looked at the wall. Put her hand against the tiles. They were cool. Smooth. Real. Her palm flattened against them and the temperature was specific, not cold but not warm, the temperature of a surface that existed whether she was touching it or not.

"They're cool," she said.

"How many can your hand cover."

She looked. "Four. Four and a half. My hand's not big enough for five."

"That's okay. Four and a half is enough."

She laughed. A wet, broken sound that came from somewhere she didn't control, that sounded like it had been stepped on. "Is that a metaphor?"

"No. It's a tile count."

She pressed her forehead against the wall. The tiles were cool on her skin. The fluorescent light hummed above her and her hand was flat against the wall and the phone was warm against her ear and she was breathing. In. Out. In. Out. His rhythm. Hers. Both.

"A girl came in," she said. Quietly. To the tiles. "Her brother died in a car accident. He was twenty-three. She's twenty. She's wearing his jumper. She said the last thing she told him was..."

She stopped.

"You don't have to say it," he said.

"Get an Uber." She said it anyway. Because she'd been carrying it alone for five years and this was the first time she'd heard someone else say the same words in the same order about the same kind of night and the same kind of brother and the same stupid, ordinary, unforgivable sentence that was supposed to be nothing and turned out to be the last thing.

He was quiet.

"She said it," Mollie said. "The same words. Sitting across from me. The same, Fayiz, she said the exact words I said to Charlie. And she was wearing his jumper and she looked like... she looked like me. Five years ago. She looked exactly like me."

"She's not you."

"I know she's not me."

"She's not you, Mollie. She's someone else who said the same thing and it's terrible and it's a coincidence and it's not your fault and it was never your fault."

"I know that."

"You know it. You don't believe it."

The tiles blurred. She pressed harder against the wall. Her hand ached. Her forehead ached. The fluorescent light hummed and hummed and hummed.

"Tell me about the soap," he said.

"What?"

"The pink soap. In the dispenser. Press it. Tell me what it feels like."

She turned from the wall. Pressed the soap dispenser. A bead of pink soap landed in her palm. She looked at it. Small. Bright. Viscous. Absurdly pink, the pink of something that was trying very hard to be cheerful in a room that didn't deserve it.

"It's cold," she said. "And very pink. Aggressively pink. Like bubblegum had a corporate job."

He laughed. Small. The one she knew.

"Wash your hands," he said.

She turned on the tap. The water ran for ten seconds. She washed her hands. The soap foamed. The water was lukewarm. She watched the pink dissolve into white and then into nothing and she stood at the sink in the staff bathroom of a funeral home and washed her hands while a painter in a studio across the city breathed with her through a phone and didn't ask if she was okay.

"How long have I been in here?" she said.

"Four minutes."

"It felt like an hour."

"I timed it. Theodore is staring at me because I stopped painting mid-stroke and he doesn't approve of interrupted process."

"What were you painting?"

A pause. Small. She heard it. Felt it. The pause of a man deciding whether to lie.

"Nothing finished," he said. Which wasn't an answer and was, therefore, an answer.

She dried her hands on a paper towel. Looked in the mirror. The crack ran from the upper left to the middle. Her face was on one side of it. She looked pale. She looked like she'd been crying, which she had, though she didn't remember when it started. Her mascara was smudged under her left eye. She wiped it with her thumb.

"I have to go back," she said.

"I know."

"The Hennesseys are still in the consultation room. Martin's with them but I should... I should be there. She needs someone who..." She stopped. She needs someone who understands. That was the sentence. She needs someone across the table who knows what get an Uber sounds like when it's the last thing you ever say.

"Go back," he said. "Finish the day. I'll be here."

"Where? At the studio?"

"Anywhere. I'll be anywhere. Call me again if you need to describe more soap."

She closed her eyes.

Opened them.

The bathroom was still there. The tiles, the light, the crack, the soap. Everything exactly where it was. The world hadn't moved. She had just briefly left it and now she was back and the pink soap was still corporate bubblegum and the tap still didn't trust her and the paper towel was still on the floor.

"Fayiz."

"Yeah."

"How did you know to do that? The seeing thing. The tiles."

A pause. Longer this time.

"Because I've been in rooms like that," he said. "And nobody told me to look at the tiles. And it took me a lot longer than four minutes to come back."

She pressed the phone against her ear and held it there and said nothing.

"Thank you," she said.

"Thursday," he said.

"It's already Thursday."

"Then I'll see you at breakfast. Which is done. So I'll see you Tuesday." A beat. "Unless you need to call me before then. In which case I'll answer on the fourth ring. Or the first. I'm flexible."

She laughed. A small, real, wet thing. "The first ring is desperate."

"The first ring is prepared."

She hung up. Stood in the bathroom for ten more seconds. Put the phone in her pocket. Fixed her face in the cracked mirror. The face that went back on: professional, kind, measured. The face she'd built for this. The armour.

But underneath it, now, something else. Something that hadn't been there twenty minutes ago. The sound of someone breathing on the other end of a phone at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon because she'd called and he'd answered and he'd known not to ask if she was okay.

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