You are writing literary fiction in close third person, past tense.

Mara stood at the kitchen window and watched the rain come down in sheets across the back garden. The pots on the sill were too wet to hold dry soil anymore; she had stopped watering them days ago. Her phone lay on the counter behind her, face up, sound on, the way she had left it every morning since the funeral.

Ines was at the table with a cup of tea she had stopped drinking an hour ago. The surface had gone cold and formed a thin skin. Ines didn't seem to mind.

"He'll call," Ines said. She said it every few hours, in the same tone, as though she were remarking on the weather.

Mara didn't answer. She had nothing left to say about it. She had already said the things she could say—*He promised*, and *It's been three days*, and *He's my brother too*—and each one had come out wrong, or had come back wrong, changed by the look on Ines's face.

She wiped the condensation from the glass with the heel of her hand. The garden was almost dark at four in the afternoon. The lavender she had planted years ago had spread beyond the border now, and she ought to have cut it back in September.

She heard Ines get up and rinse the mug in the sink. The water ran briefly, then stopped. The radiator ticked in the hallway. Somewhere a gutter was dripping into a bucket Mara had put out under the downpipe weeks ago, and the rhythm of it had become the rhythm of the house.

She looked up at the clock above the stove. It was the clock her father had given her for her thirtieth birthday, a heavy thing with a brass frame and Roman numerals that had never quite kept good time. She had never learned to wind it properly. The minute hand sat a little behind where it should have been.

Ines came back into the room and stood beside her at the window. She didn't speak. They watched the rain together, and the garden filled and emptied and filled again with the sound of it.

Mara reached for her phone, then stopped. She lifted the clock off its hook instead and turned it over in her hands, feeling the cool brass, the worn key, the small scratch near the hinge where he had once dropped it. She fitted the key into the slot and began to turn it, slowly, listening for the catch.

The rain had been going since before light, the fine kind that didn't fall so much as hang, and by noon the windows had gone soft and grey as tracing paper. Mara had the phone face-up on the counter beside the sugar bowl. She had put it there at breakfast the way you might set a place for someone.

Ines was making tea she wouldn't drink. She had opened three cupboards looking for the strainer and left them all standing open, and Mara found she could not bring herself to close them, because closing them would be a remark, and a remark would start something.

"He's not going to call today either," Ines said.

"You don't know that."

"I know him." Ines poured, missing the cup a little, wiping the counter with the flat of her hand. "He'll call in six weeks about the house. He'll be very reasonable on the phone and I'll want to put my fist through a wall."

"He might just be —" Mara turned her wrist, a gesture that was supposed to contain grief, distance, the difficulty of dialing. It contained nothing. "It's three days."

"It's three days," Ines agreed, and sat down, and the chair legs shrieked on the tile, and neither of them said anything about that.

Outside, the gutter had blocked again and water came off the corner of the roof in a rope. Mara watched it braid and unbraid itself. She thought about the number of hours involved, which was seventy-two, roughly, and that the arithmetic of it was a thing she should stop doing, and that she would keep doing it.

"The flowers were nice," Ines said. "In the end."

"They came late."

"They came." Ines wrapped both hands around the cup. "You did everything. I want that said out loud in this kitchen. You did everything, and he stood at the back in his good coat, and he left before the cars."

"He looked terrible."

"He looked like a man who'd already left."

The phone lit. Mara's whole body went toward it, an involuntary lean, shameful, and it was a bank, an offer, a rate, and she turned the screen down against the counter with two fingers, gently, the way you'd close a door on a sleeping child.

Ines was looking at her. Mara took the cold tea from her sister's hands and poured it into the sink, and then she went out through the back door into the rain, in her socks, and reached up into the gutter with her bare arm and began pulling out the wet black leaves.

The rain had been going on so long that Mara no longer heard it as rain, just a pressure against the windows, like the house was being held underwater. She stood at the sink with a mug she wasn't drinking from, and watched the water come down the glass in threads that kept breaking and reforming.

"He'll call," Ines said from the table. She had her coat still on, though she'd been inside for an hour, as if she hadn't decided yet whether she was staying.

"He said three days."

"He said he'd call soon. That's not the same as three days."

Mara set the mug down without having drunk from it. "It's been three days."

Ines turned a page of the newspaper she wasn't reading either. The kitchen light made everything a little too yellow, a little too warm for how the day actually felt. Outside, the neighbor's tarp had come loose from the woodpile again and was flapping, a dull wet slap against the logs, on and off, on and off.

"He's not good with phones," Ines said. "You know this."

"He's not good with a lot of things."

"That's not fair."

"I didn't say it to be fair."

Ines folded the newspaper in half, then in half again, until it was a small dense square she could have thrown. "You could call him."

"I'm not calling him."

"Why not?"

Mara didn't answer. She was thinking of the last thing she'd said to him at the church, some ordinary sentence about parking, and how neither of them had cried yet, not really, not where the other could see it. She was thinking that if she called and he didn't answer that would be worse than this, than the waiting, which at least still had the shape of a possibility in it.

The tarp slapped again, harder, and she saw it come fully loose and lift, a pale shape in the gray yard, twisting once before it dropped into the mud.

"I'm going to get that," she said.

"It's pouring."

"I know."

She didn't put on a coat. She went out through the side door and across the yard in her socks, feeling the cold mud come up between her toes before she'd even reached it, and she bent down and gathered the tarp into her arms, heavy now with rain, and held it against her chest like something that needed carrying inside.

Rain pressed against the kitchen windows in long, wavering lines, blurring the garden into a dark wash of leaves and fence posts. Mara stood with her hand around a cold mug, watching water gather at the edge of the sill and slip away.

Her phone lay facedown beside the sugar bowl.

Ines had arrived an hour earlier with a paper bag of oranges and a wet umbrella that dripped steadily into the hall. She had not taken off her coat. Now she sat at the table, peeling an orange in one unbroken spiral, her thumbnail working carefully beneath the rind.

“He might be busy,” Ines said.

Mara looked at the phone.

“He has a job,” Ines added. “Children. A life.”

“So do I.”

Ines’s hands paused. The strip of peel hung from her fingers like something shed.

Mara had waited through the first evening after the funeral, when the house still smelled faintly of lilies and damp wool. She had waited the next morning, then the following night, charging her phone beside the bed though it had been nearly full. On the third day she had carried it from room to room, placing it on the counter while she washed dishes, on the arm of the sofa while she answered emails she did not read, beside her plate at lunch.

Nothing.

“He spoke to me,” Ines said.

Mara turned from the window. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

The rain ticked faster against the glass. Somewhere beyond the kitchen, the radiator gave a soft metallic knock.

“What did he say?”

Ines separated an orange segment and held it out, but Mara did not take it. Juice shone on Ines’s thumb.

“He asked whether you were all right.”

Mara laughed once, without sound. “Did he.”

“He didn’t know what to say.”

“He could have called.”

“Yes.”

The simplicity of it sat between them. Ines lowered her hand. The orange segment slipped onto the tablecloth, leaving a bright wet mark.

Mara imagined her brother’s number appearing on the screen—not his voice, not his face, only the small arrangement of digits and the name she had not been able to bring herself to delete. She hated that she could still feel the shape of expectation in her body, a tightening behind the ribs whenever the phone shifted from silence to any small light.

Ines began gathering the peel into the paper bag.

“Don’t defend him,” Mara said.

“I’m not.”

“You always do.”

Ines looked up then, her expression stripped of patience. “And you always make a place for people to fail you.”

Mara set the mug down too hard. Tea jumped over the rim and ran across her knuckles.

Neither of them moved while it spread, amber and thin, toward the phone.

Then Mara picked it up and carried it to the sink.

The rain had been falling since dawn, a relentless, slate-colored drumming that flattened the hydrangeas against the parlor glass. Mara kept the telephone face-up on the low walnut table, its blank screen reflecting the grey rectangle of the window. Three days since the funeral, and her brother had not called. He had not sent a message, nor had he checked in with Ines, whose own device lay face-down on the arm of the sofa, deliberately abandoned.

Across the rug, Ines sat with her knees drawn up, methodically paring a green apple with a small kitchen knife. The peel coiled away in a continuous ribbon that draped over her knuckles. She did not look at the table. At forty-one, Mara recognized the calculated mercy of her sister’s silence; Ines possessed an instinct for when another person’s waiting had curdled into humiliation, and she spared her the indignity of pity.

"The radiators are clanking again," Ines said softly, without looking up from the fruit.

"The valve on the landing is loose," Mara said.

Her voice sounded thin, stripped of timbre by the damp that crept under the baseboards. The house smelled of boiled tea and wet wool. In the vestibule, their coats hung dripping onto the linoleum—hers, Ines’s, and the heavy black overcoat their father had left behind on the brass peg. It hung there swollen with humidity, exhaling the faint, medicinal camphor that had outlived him.

A car rattled past on the street outside, its tires hissing through standing water. Mara’s gaze flicked to the street, watching the red taillights dissolve into the fog, before returning to the small glass rectangle on the walnut. Nothing lit up. The battery icon remained frozen at forty percent. Her fingers twitched in her lap, aching to press the button, to verify once more that the volume was not muted, that the ringer had not failed.

Ines quartered the peeled apple with two sharp, clean strokes and set the blade aside. She did not offer a piece, and Mara was grateful not to have to refuse it.

The rain quickened, drumming hard against the tin awning above the back porch. Mara stood up from the armchair, the stiff fabric of her mourning skirt pulling tight across her knees. She crossed the room to the front window, unlatched the brass catch, and shoved the heavy sash upward into its frame.