The flat came with four bare hooks and a kettle somebody had left behind. Nadia stood in the middle of it at half six in the morning, still in her coat, listening to gulls argue over the roof of the fishmonger's across the road. For eleven years she had woken to traffic; now there was only water, moving somewhere she couldn't see. She set the kettle down on the counter and did not fill it. Her suitcases held everything she had decided was worth the journey, which turned out to be less than she expected and more than she could carry in one trip up the stairs.

Outside, the tide was going out. The light came in low and pale across the floorboards, the way it does in a room nobody has been happy in yet.