Rooms with Empty Names

At breakfast, Mireille set out three cups before quietly returning one to the cupboard. Elena pretended not to notice. Her father had been dead eighteen months, and the unused cup seemed more intimate than the black ribbon still tied around his portrait.

“The buyer is Sabine Duret,” Mireille said. “A serious woman. She'll retain the building.”

“And the staff?”

“She's reviewing that.”

Elena buttered a piece of toast until it tore. “How much debt?”

Her mother named a figure that made the kitchen seem smaller. There was a bank loan for the lift, a winter of missed bookings, suppliers who had accepted promises until promises stopped paying them. Her father had managed the accounts through his illness. Afterward Mireille had managed by not looking too closely.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You sent money for the funeral. You had your own life.”

That phrase had served them both for years. Elena carried her cup upstairs rather than argue with it again.

Room Seven smelled of lavender furniture wax. She opened its shutters to the harbor, where a fisherman was bailing his boat with a red saucepan. On the wardrobe door, someone had penciled a child's height and the date. She remembered holding the pencil while her father straightened a little boy against the wood. Families used to return every September, growing through the rooms.

A scraping sound came from the terrace below. Lucien knelt beside a lifted tile, photographing the crumbling mortar beneath it. His work jacket bore the name of a small architectural practice, his own surname underneath.

“You became an architect,” she called before she could stop herself.

He looked up. “Eventually.”

She had wanted to ask whether he had ever reached the school in Marseille. Instead she asked whether the terrace was dangerous.

“In places. The drains were blocked for years. Water's been sitting under the tiles.”

“My father said it was sound.”

“Your father disliked paying for things he couldn't see.”

She bristled, then remembered a kitchen pipe held together with tape. Lucien saw the recollection cross her face and looked away kindly, which annoyed her more than criticism.

“Will your report stop the sale?”

“It will describe the building.” He stood, carefully testing his weight. “What people do with the truth isn't always my decision.”

She shut the window too firmly. In the glass, her reflection looked exactly like her mother.