That is not a fortnight. Nobody brings a houseplant for a fortnight.
The bell went.
I opened my own front door and stood in the middle of the doorway with my hands at my sides.
Audrey gave me the smile.
"Which room has Dalton cleared out for me?"
"He hasn't."
The smile went off like a light.
Bette did a sigh you could have heard from the road. "Oh, don't start, Mira."
I looked past both of them at what was on my porch.
"You've arrived with enough to move in."
"Dalton said I could stay."
"You're very welcome to come in and have a coffee. You're not moving in today."
"My son lives here."
"He does."
And Audrey Brace bent down, picked up that peace lily in both hands, and held it out at me, and when I did not take it she pushed it into my chest so that I had to.
"Give me that, hold it. Move out of the way, sweetheart, these are heavy."
And then she said the other thing.
She said it quite pleasantly. That is what I was not ready for.
"You're not even on the deed."
I stood in my own doorway holding a houseplant.
And six years went through me in about two seconds.
Every Christmas in that woman's front room where I was introduced to somebody as Dalton's wife and never by name. The time in 2022 she rang the landline and asked to speak to the owner. The way Bette says your little business.
It all fitted. That was the sentence underneath all of it, and I had never once heard anybody say it out loud until that afternoon on my own step.
Audrey rang Dalton. It went to voicemail.
She rang again. Voicemail.
And Bette got her phone out and started filming me, holding it up at head height about four feet away, the way you film a person you have already decided about.
"Just so we've got it," she said.
And Audrey Brace, seventy-four years old, dialled the police.
I did not say one word while she did it. I want that noted because of what the officers said later.
She told them there was a woman refusing to let her into her son's property and that she was elderly and her belongings were outside in the rain, which was a stretch, because it was dry until about nine that night.
