Chapter 3: Seven Years of Sacrifice

Sophia's new flat smelled of fresh paint and burnt toast, and it was the first place in weeks where Clara had laughed without checking whether she was allowed to.

It was a small top-floor flat in Clapham, with sloping ceilings and a kitchen the size of a wardrobe, and on Saturday morning it was knee-deep in cardboard boxes. Sophia stood in the middle of them in dungarees and a flour-streaked T-shirt, holding a roll of tape in one hand and a half-eaten slice of toast in the other, and announced that she had labeled every box with great care and could not now remember what any of the labels meant. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head with a pencil. She was twenty-seven, a pastry chef at a busy restaurant in Shoreditch, and she had inherited the family's stubborn chin along with a boldness that Clara had never quite possessed. When Clara arrived, Sophia hugged her so hard that her feet left the ground, and then stepped back, held her at arm's length and frowned.

"You have got thinner."

"I have not."

"You have. And you are doing the smile." Sophia waved the tape in a small circle in front of Clara's face. "The one you do at family funerals. The polite one. Take it off, please. I am not a guest."

"I am only tired," Clara said, and laughed, because it was impossible not to, and took off her coat.

They worked through the morning. Clara carried boxes up the narrow stairs and unpacked the kitchen with a method that made Sophia groan, sorting plates by size and glasses by height, while Sophia sat on the counter and talked. She talked about the head chef who had thrown a whisk at a wall, and the new boyfriend who could not boil an egg, and the neighbor downstairs who had a pet parrot that said hello in a man's voice at three in the morning. It was easy and noisy and warm, and Clara realized, somewhere around noon, that she was enjoying herself in the particular way of someone who has been holding her breath for a long time and has only just been reminded that she can stop.

Her phone buzzed on the windowsill. She glanced at it. It was a message from Dominic. Could you collect my suit from the tailor on your way home? Thanks x

"Who is that?" Sophia asked, without looking up from the box she was cutting open.

"Dominic. He needs me to pick up his suit."

"Does he." Sophia put down the knife. "You are in Clapham, helping your sister move, and your husband has sent you on an errand."

"It is on my way. And he is very busy."

"He is always very busy." Sophia said it lightly, but her eyes did not leave Clara's face. "Do you know what you did just then? When the phone buzzed? You flinched, and then you smoothed it over. It took about half a second. I have been watching you do it since you walked in."

"I did not flinch."

"Clara."

"I am fine." She typed, Of course, and put the phone face down. "Honestly. He is not a bad husband, Sophie. You know he is not. He has never raised his voice to me. He has never even looked at anyone else." She heard how thin it sounded, and went on anyway, because she could not seem to stop. "When Gran died, he drove through the night to get to me. Do you remember? Two in the morning, and he came into the hospital still in his work clothes, and he sat with you for hours while I was with her. He held your hand when you were crying. You told me that day he was the kindest man you had ever met."

"I remember." Sophia's voice had softened. "I said that, and I meant it. He was good, that night. He was good for a long time." She shrugged, with a small, rueful twist of her mouth. "That is what makes it so annoying. I would like to be able to hate him properly, and I cannot, because I know exactly who he used to be."

"Then why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because I do not think you are talking about the man who is there now." Sophia slid off the counter and sat on the floor among the boxes, patting the space beside her. "Come on. I am not going to shout. I am going to eat a sandwich and you are going to sit down."

Clara sat. Sophia handed her half a sandwich, and for a minute they ate in silence, shoulder to shoulder, as they had done as children on the back steps of their parents' house.

"I am not going to tell you what to do," Sophia said at last. "I want you to know that. You are the cleverest person I know, and you do not need me to run your life. But I am your sister, and I have eyes. You never say we anymore. You say Dominic wants, Dominic thinks, Dominic is busy. When was the last time you said I want?"

Clara opened her mouth to answer, and found that she could not think of an example.

"Exactly," said Sophia, quietly.

It was an odd, hollow moment. Clara looked at the sandwich in her hands. "It is not that simple. It was never one big decision. It was a hundred small ones. He travels so much, and the house needs running, and somebody has to be there for his mother's dinners and his father's birthdays. It was easier if I was free. It made sense."

"For him."

"For both of us."

"Clara." Sophia was looking past her now, at the corner of the room, where the last of the boxes stood. "Is that what you want to show me, or was I meant to find it myself?"

Clara followed her glance and felt her stomach drop. A wooden trunk stood against the wall, scuffed and familiar, with a faded sticker on one side. She had left it at Sophia's old flat six years ago, when the Kensington house had seemed too full of Dominic's things and too empty of her own, and she had never once come back to open it. She had not even known that Sophia had kept it.

"I did not want to throw it away," Sophia said gently. "I thought you might want it one day."

She did not decide to open it. It happened the way a hand will go to a bruise. Inside, folded in tissue paper, lay the model she had built in her final year at university, a tiny library of white card with a staircase that curled up through its center like a ribbon, and beside it a stack of sketchbooks, soft with handling, and a manila envelope with a Danish stamp. She turned the envelope over. The letter inside was dated six years ago. It was an offer from a small studio in Copenhagen, a place on a design team for a year, signed by a woman whose work she had admired since she was nineteen. She remembered reading it standing in the hall of the Kensington house with her coat still on, flushed with a wild, disbelieving joy, and she remembered that Dominic had been about to leave for Hong Kong.

"I did not decline it because he told me to," she said, very low. "He said it was my decision. He said, whatever you want, Clara. He meant it."

"I am sure he did."

"I was the one who said no. I said I could not leave London while his business was growing, and that I would go another time." She touched the staircase with one finger. It was still perfect. "He never asked me to stay."

"No," said Sophia, quietly. "He did not have to."

Clara did not cry. She sat on the floor of her sister's new flat with a child's model in her lap and the afternoon light falling through the skylight, and she felt something she could not quite name. It was not anger. It was closer to the feeling of seeing an old photograph of herself, a young woman with an impossible, shining future, and discovering that she had walked past that woman for six years without a word.

"I am going to take this home," she said.

"Good."

"Not to make a point. I just do not want it in a trunk."

"That is a very good reason." Sophia put an arm around her shoulders, and Clara leaned into it, and for a while neither of them said anything.

She collected the suit on the way home, as she had promised, and carried it into the house over her arm in its plastic cover. Dominic was in the kitchen, still in his shirtsleeves, going through a stack of papers with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, and he looked up and smiled with real warmth. "Thank you. You are a lifesaver."

"It was no trouble."

She set the suit over a chair. She had the envelope in her bag, and for a long moment she stood there holding the strap, trying to decide whether to take it out. Perhaps it was only the afternoon, and the sandwich, and Sophia's patient face. Perhaps it was only that she wanted, very much, to be the kind of wife who could say something true over a kitchen counter.

"Dominic," she said, "do you remember Copenhagen?"

"Copenhagen?" He frowned pleasantly, turning a page. "Did we go to Copenhagen? I thought it was Stockholm, that spring."

She stood very still. The kitchen was warm and bright, and the clock ticked on the wall, and her husband bent again over his papers, entirely at ease. He was not being cruel. That was the thing she understood, in the small, clear space of that second. He had not forgotten on purpose. He simply had never known it was something to remember.

"Never mind," she said. "It was nothing."

And she went upstairs to put the model on her dressing table, where he would see it if he looked.