The rice had caught. Lena scraped the pan under the tap and watched the black flakes spin toward the plughole, and that was when her phone buzzed on the counter.
Can you come. Don't tell mum.
Jo did not use punctuation when she was fine. She used it when she wanted Lena to move.
Lena rinsed her hands and did not reply. She turned off the tap. She dried her fingers on the tea towel that still had last Sunday's gravy on it, and she picked up her keys from the bowl by the door. Her own flat key. The car. The supermarket fob that never scanned on the first try. And Jo's spare, cut in a hurry six years ago at the kiosk on the station concourse, still hanging on the cheap yellow ring they had thrown in for free.
She locked up and took the stairs. The lift smelled of other people's dinners.
She was on the ring road, in the left-hand lane, before she understood that she was angry.
Not the useful kind. The kind that sat in the jaw. Jo had sent four words and Lena had left a pan in the sink and a light on in the hall, because that was the arrangement, unwritten, older than the key: Jo asked, Lena came. Their mother called it being close. Lena had called it that too, for years, because the other words were less kind.
She drove. The sky over the retail park was the colour of a dirty sheet. A bus threw rainwater up the side of the car and she did not flinch. She knew the route without the satnav. She had always known it.
Jo's building had a door that stuck in wet weather. Lena put her shoulder to it the way she always did. The stairwell smelled of bleach and someone else's garlic. On the second landing a child's scooter lay on its side, one wheel still turning, as if it had been dropped in the last minute.
The chain was off.
Jo had known she would come. Of course she had known.
Lena used the spare key anyway, because that was what you did with a spare key, and because some small, ungenerous part of her wanted the sound of it in the lock.
Jo was on the sofa in a hoodie Lena had left there in March. The television was on mute. A mug of something had gone cold on the floor. She looked up and she was not dying, and she was not bleeding, and she was not even crying. She looked like a person who had been waiting, which was worse.
"You came," Jo said.
"You asked."
Jo tucked her feet under her. "I need you to talk to Mum."
Lena stood with the key still in her hand. She could feel the yellow ring cutting a little into her finger.
"About what."
"Martin. The money. She thinks I'm being dramatic." Jo said dramatic the way their mother said it, with the d a little too clear. "She'll listen if it's you."
Lena looked at the room. The pile of post on the table. The plant she had brought that Jo had not watered and had not thrown away. The hook by the door where the spare key was supposed to live, empty, because it lived on Lena's ring, in Lena's bowl, in Lena's life.
"Is he here," Lena said.
"No."
"Are you all right."
Jo's mouth did something that was not a smile. "I'm all right enough. I just can't do her on my own. Not today."
Lena heard herself from a long way off, the version of her that would already be sitting down, already composing the phone call, already being the good one. That version had left the rice in the sink.
She put the key in her own coat pocket.
"I'm going to tell her you asked me not to," she said.
Jo sat up. "Lena."
"You can call her. Or I can. But I'm not going to be the person you send in first."
The scooter wheel on the landing had stopped. Somewhere in the building a washing machine moved into spin. Jo looked at Lena's pocket, at the shape of the key, and for a moment she looked very young, which was a trick she had always been able to do.
"Keep it," Jo said, quietly. "For if you change your mind."
Lena took it out of her pocket and set it on the table, on the pile of post, next to a letter with their mother's handwriting on the front.
"I know where you live," she said. "That's different."
She went out and pulled the door to until it clicked. She did not wait to hear whether Jo put the chain on. On the stairs she passed the scooter, and she stood it up, and she went down into the wet and the smell of the ring road and the particular quiet of having nowhere she was supposed to be.