Soul Sanctuary Hub

The truths we store · The courage of honesty · Gathering what is ours

Part One: The Flat

Her sister’s flat smelled of someone who had been expecting to return. Not the particular quality of air that belongs to spaces that have been empty for a long time. But of interruption. Of a life that had been set down mid-sentence. The plants on the kitchen windowsill were dead now, several weeks past saving, but they had clearly been alive and tended and watered on a regular schedule until the schedule stopped. A library book on the coffee table had a receipt tucked inside it as a bookmark, a coffee receipt from the Thursday before, Neve could see from the date. Her sister had been on page one hundred and seventy-three. She had intended to finish it.

Neve had been meaning to come for three weeks. She had not been avoiding it, she told herself she had not been avoiding it, and this was mostly true, in the way that most self-assessments are mostly true, leaving a small residue of something that doesn’t quite fit the description. She had brought boxes. Four, from the supermarket, flattened and folded under her arm. The intention was to begin. Not to finish, for there was too much here to finish in a day, or a week probably, but to begin. To open the door and enter the space and make some kind of start on the enormous and unasked-for work of converting a life into an estate.

Her sister Claire had been forty-four. She had been the kind of forty-four that sometimes goes without much notice. Quietly accomplished, privately rich in the ways that don’t photograph well. She had been a teacher of secondary school English, which meant she had spent twenty years handing adolescents the tools of language and watching what they made of them, and she had found this not exhausting, as some people did, but genuinely replenishing. She had had two serious relationships, both ended carefully. She had a wide circle of people who had showed up in the weeks following her death in numbers that had surprised Neve, who had not known the width of her sister’s life.

She had also had a shelf.