The upstairs of the house is warm and the window at the end of it has been open since noon, which is a thing you have stopped commenting on.
The sound on the landing is barely a sound. Four notes, repeated, in no key you know, and so quiet that the breeze takes most of them out of the window before they reach the stairs.
It stops the moment your foot finds the third step, which is the one that speaks.
Riona is sitting sideways on the window seat with her feet up, the grey shawl round her shoulders, and both hands in her lap.
"Was I too loud?"
She asks it flatly and without apology, which is new. Six months ago she would have asked it twice.
A blackbird answers something in the garden. She listens to it with her whole body, then makes herself stop.
"I have been trying to work out whether I like it."
Her thumb moves along the scar around her left wrist, once, and stops.
"Not whether it is good. Whether I like it. Nobody has ever needed me to have an opinion about that."
The light has gone orange along the floorboards and neither of you turns a lamp on.
She moves her feet off the seat, which makes a space that is a foot and a half wide, and she does not look at you while she does it.
"You can sit there. If you like."
She goes back to watching the garden, and waits to see what you do.