Beth invited me to see the room on Saturday, after checking with the woman who owned the house. It was the first time she had given me the address.
“You’re coming for lunch,” she said. “Not a safety inspection.”
“Can I bring something?”
“Bread. There’s soup.”
I bought a loaf and walked from the bus stop using the directions she’d sent. The house was ordinary: two bicycles beside the wall, a winter-flowering plant near the step, a doorbell that needed pressing firmly.
Beth opened the door in a jumper I hadn’t seen before. A label still hung from the side seam.
“I bought it without sending a photograph to anybody,” she said when I pointed it out.
“Reckless.”
She fetched scissors and cut the label off.
The room upstairs was small. Her certificate stood on a shelf, still in the frame she had nearly left behind. The portfolio was under the desk. On the wall, a paper calendar contained work dates written in different colours.
I looked only where she invited me to look.
“The fridge shelf is downstairs,” she said. “Obviously the main attraction.”
We ate in the kitchen while her landlady worked in another room. Beth had made too much soup and looked pleased about having somewhere to keep the rest.
“I keep discovering things I don’t have to ask,” she said. “Then asking anyway.”
“Like what?”
“Whether I can move a chair. Whether it’s all right to come in late from work. We agreed those things at the beginning. I still feel I should explain each time.”
She buttered her bread, concentrating on the edges.
“The support worker said it can take practice. I’m trying not to turn practising into another thing I ought to do perfectly.”
After lunch she showed me the route to the venue where she’d completed the preview. It was a short walk, manageable with the equipment she regularly carried. The original guesthouse would have added a longer journey and the nightly problem of the closed kitchen.
At the corner, she stopped outside a small hardware shop.
“I need a hook for the back of the door.”
Inside, we spent ten minutes comparing options that would not damage the surface. The shopkeeper asked about the door’s thickness. Beth answered, having measured it. Nobody asked whether she was certain she wanted to hang her own coat.
As we left, Vivienne called. Beth glanced at the screen and chose to answer.
I walked a little ahead while they spoke. When she caught up, she was smiling oddly.
“She apologised for making a fuss about the change.”
“What did you say?”
“Thank you. Then she asked whether the new place was nice.”
“Did you tell her?”
“That it’s working for me. I didn’t give her a tour over the telephone.”
We walked back slowly. Beth said she had sometimes imagined Martin outside the first guesthouse after reading his messages. She didn’t know whether he had actually gone there. The police would investigate what could be established. She no longer wanted to supply the frightening parts herself.
“He could make a suggestion do the work of a fact,” she said.
I thought of the station, the stairs, the sandwiches.
“And somebody may have given him the material.”
“Yes. But they didn’t give him this.”
She gestured towards the street we were entering. Not triumphantly. Simply indicating the place where she had made a life that did not require his agreement.
Back in the room, the hook fitted. She hung up her work bag, stepped back and checked that the door still closed.
“Perfect,” she said, then laughed at the word.
Before I left, I asked whether she wanted me to keep the address private.
“Yes. If someone needs it, they can ask me.”
“Understood.”
Beth sent a photograph of the hook bearing the bag. Beneath it she wrote that the room was hers for another month while she considered a longer arrangement.
I put my phone away as the bus arrived.
Changing her mind had not been the weak point in her plan.
It was the part somebody else had failed to control.