Mara's POV
The new flat smelled like fresh paint and someone else's decisions.
She stood in the middle of it on the first evening with her two bags and her mother's photograph and the specific hollow feeling of a person who had made a choice and was now required to live inside it. The walls were white. The windows faced a brick wall. The kitchen was half the size of his and had a coffee machine that made a sound like it was apologizing for existing.
She set her mother's photograph on the windowsill — the only windowsill, the one facing the brick — and stood back and looked at it and thought: this is what starting over looks like. Again.
She'd done it before. She was good at it. She had rebuilt herself from worse than this — worse rooms, worse circumstances, less of herself intact. She
