I rang Nessa in the August, after all this. We were on the phone for two hours.
It was the same. Not the towel — a different thing, but the same shape. A rule of Nessa’s, broken daily, pleasantly, until Nessa was the unreasonable one.
Bree cannot live somewhere on somebody else’s terms. Not will not. Cannot.
Because the moment the rules in a house apply to her, she is a guest, and being a guest means it can end, and she has never once in her life been able to be somewhere that can end.
PART 5 — KELL STREET
She took the room.
Not that Friday. She stayed in our spare room for nine more days doing absolutely nothing wrong, which was its own kind of statement, and then she moved in on the second Sunday.
She was there fourteen months.
She has a flat of her own now in Vantry and a job she has held since the spring, and we speak about once a fortnight, and it is better than it has been since we were about nineteen.
