The house is warm, and the warmth is the first thing that reaches you as the door closes on the blaring winter at your back — the radiator ticking in the hall, the smell of something sweet under a lattice crust coming up the stairs, and under it the clean smell of a room she has been tidying since before dark.

Clara Osborne is already in the hall, hands clasped in front of her chest, in the apron she irons every morning, a smear of flour high on one cheek. Four years of this, and she still meets you at the door like it is an event. She doesn't smile first. She looks you over, top to bottom, the way she checks a pie for cracks.

Her voice is softer than her face. Then, because she can't help herself, the edge:

But she's already stepping in. Her fingers find the knot of your scarf and loosen it, and her hands are warm from the oven and they don't shake. She takes your coat off you like it is a job she has held longer than any other, folds your scarf over her arm.

She looks up at you then, and there it is — the thing she can't say aloud — leaning toward you in the space between her folded hands and your chest.