At home, Mara put Theo on the sofa with a cold cloth for his numb face and opened the notebook to the page after Professor Nash.
She wrote the date. She wrote CASE 03.
She left the page under it blank and shut the book on the pen.
Theo knocked once and came into her room before she answered. That was his rule.
"Dad says we're going to Gran's tomorrow," he said.
"I know."
"You hate going there on Mom Day."
"It isn't called Mom Day."
"You know what I mean."
She did. Tomorrow was ten years. He sat on the end of her bed and picked at the sticker the dentist had given him, looking young and tired and a little sorry for himself.
"I don't really remember her," he said.
He said it lightly, but he kept his eyes on the sticker.
"That's all right," Mara said.
"Is it?"
She thought about lying to him.
"I don't know," she said.
He nodded, like that was the better answer. "What was she like?"
"Late."
"That's it?"
"Always late."
Mara told him the rest. Mom burned rice. She sang along to everything and got the words wrong, and she wouldn't be corrected. She couldn't stand cats, and every cat on the street came to their door.
"Go on."
"She hid chocolate in the freezer, behind the peas. She thought Dad would never look behind peas."
Theo was smiling. "Did he?"
"Every time. He used to leave her one square."
Theo laughed, and went quiet, storing it away. He had maybe twenty of these stories, and he kept them in the order he got them.
At the door, he stopped.
"That lady in the shop," he said.
Mara didn't move.
"You do this thing. You did it with her. You look at people like they're yours."
He picked at the dentist's sticker again. "You do it to me all the time. The lunch money and my bag and the notebook. You know you don't have to be my mom, right? Nobody said."
Then he heard what he'd said. Mara saw it on his face.
"I didn't mean it like..."
"It's fine, Theo."
He went.
It wasn't fine, because he was right. After the accident their father had gone on living in the house. Bills got paid and forms came back signed. Everything else, Mara did: the lunches, the school meetings, a fever at three in the morning. Nobody asked her to. Somebody had to, and she was always the one there.
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'He's twelve... how did he see that?'
The clock by her bed said ten to five. Whatever had happened in that shop was over by now.
***
Gran lived on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, and the stair rail moved when you leaned on it. Mara had reported it to the landlord three times. On Sunday it gave about two centimeters at the second floor.
"It's a railing," Theo said.
"It's a railing with two bolts where there should be four."
He opened his mouth, remembered yesterday, and shut it.
Dad came up last with flowers and a tray of kibbeh from a bakery. He always climbed these stairs slowly, so most of the hugging was done by the time he arrived. He was never that slow on any other stairs.
She checked above him before she checked the door. Above Theo. Nothing.
Gran opened the door already talking, smelling of orange blossom water and frying oil. She was eighty-one. Mara made herself hold her for the whole hug before she lifted her eyes.
Above Gran there was only the crack over the doorframe that Mara had known all her life.
She breathed out against Gran's shoulder. Gran patted her back twice, quickly, like Mara had sneezed.
On the sideboard stood three photos of Mara's mother, with a pale rectangle on the wood where a fourth used to be. Gran rotated them. She said it was so none of them faded. Mara thought it was so she never had to see all four at once.
At lunch, Gran told the story about Mom arriving forty minutes late to her own engagement party with wet hair. Dad laughed where he always laughed. Theo laughed half a second after him, checking. He'd been two. He had no memory to put under the story.
"Mara's not eating," Gran told the table. "Look at her. She has her list face."
"I don't have a list face."
"You've had it since you could write." Gran put another spoonful on Mara's plate. "Your mother never made a list in her life. She'd go out for bread and come back two hours later with no bread and a story."
"They were good stories," Dad said.
"They were never bread!"
Nobody spoke for a moment. Dad turned his glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth.
"She used to check my sums," he said, to the glass. "I'd bring the pump schedules home, and she'd still have her coat on, and she'd put her finger on the line that was wrong. Every time. She kept the books for three shops. She said engineers couldn't count. We estimated, rounded up to be safe, and called it a number."
"Was she right?" Theo asked.
"She was never wrong about a number in her life. She just couldn't tell you what time it was."
Gran laughed so hard she had to put her fork down.
Mara stared at her father. He hadn't said that many words about Mom in years. All her life she'd thought she got her head for numbers from him.
She'd come with a plan to tell one of them. Dad, because he read about the brain at three in the morning. Or Gran, because nothing had surprised Gran in decades. She even had the first sentence ready.
'On Tuesday, I saw something I can't explain.'
But if she said the first sentence, she'd have to say all of them. And one of them was that yesterday she'd read a stranger's number and walked out of the shop.
She ate what was on her plate. On the way down, she took a photo of the loose rail for the landlord. Theo put his hand beside it for scale without being asked.
***
On Monday, Mara went back to the grocery store.
She told herself it was for rice. They had rice.
The girl at the checkout was the same one from Saturday, and she knew Mara by sight.
"You were in on Saturday," she said, scanning. "With your brother. You missed it."
"Missed what?"
"Sitt Wadad. The old lady with the right coins. Everybody around here called her Sitt, like she was all our grandmothers." The girl turned the rice over to find the barcode. "She'd paid and gone out. The boy said she sat down on the curb by the carts, very calm, with her bags. And then she lay down."
Mara's hand stopped on her purse.
"Twenty years she's been coming in... Twenty years! They said it was very quick. A bleed in the head. Nothing anyone could have seen."
"What time was that?" Mara asked.
"I don't know. Four? Just before. We'd only just done the three o'clock change."
"Was anyone with her?"
"The boy who does the carts. He held her hand till they came." The girl pushed the rice down the belt. "She bought a melon. It rolled right out into the road. Isn't that a stupid thing to remember?"
Mara paid for the rice. She walked out past the carts, past the stretch of curb where it must have happened, and stood at the tram stop.
'A bleed in the head. Nothing anyone could have seen.'
Thirty-eight minutes of following her would not have found a bleed inside her head. Mara knew that. It didn't make her feel any better.
The count had been right three times now. With Professor Nash, she'd kept him at his desk and the clock had stopped at twenty-nine seconds. With Wadad, she'd read the number, picked a cereal, and gone home. Both numbers had been real.
Two trams came that weren't hers. On the third, she wrote it down.
CASE 03. Female, about 70. Named afterward: Wadad. Saturday. Seen directly, 00:38:11, no reflection. Appeared healthy throughout. No cause identified. No intervention. Outcome: died, cause given as a bleed in the brain, time consistent with zero.
It was accurate, but it left out the most important part.
So under it, in smaller writing, she put that in too.
I walked out of the shop at 00:29.
The tram stopped at Cut Bridge and the doors folded open. A man got on with a cough, then a mother with a stroller, then a crowd of schoolkids shoving each other, eleven people in all.
Mara closed the notebook on the pen and looked above every one of their heads.