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Eleanor had a habit of closing things.

Doors, curtains, conversations that had gone on long enough. She was not an unkind woman. The people who knew her would have said she was warm, in her way, reliable in the manner of someone you could count on to be exactly where they said they would be. But she was also, if they were being precise about it, someone who preferred things settled. Finished. Contained.

The windows in her house were almost always shut.

She told herself it was practical. The noise from the street. The cold in winter. The pollen, in spring, that made her eyes itch. There was always a reason, and the reasons were never entirely wrong. But her daughter Mia, who was eleven and observed things with the particular accuracy of children who have not yet learned to be diplomatic about what they see, had once said: “Mum, our house smells like indoors.”

Eleanor had not known what to say to that.

She had been in a long, quiet grief. Not the sharp grief of sudden loss but the slow, accumulating kind that comes from a life that has drifted, without any single dramatic moment, a long way from where you thought it was going. Her marriage had ended two years ago, cleanly, without rancour, which somehow made it harder to explain. There was no villain. There was no clean story of what went wrong. There was just the gradual discovery that two people can be kind to each other for years and still be, in the most fundamental sense, lonely in each other’s company.

She had closed things after that. Kept things small. Kept things manageable.

The windows, always, shut.

It was the first week of April when she left one open by accident.