The Warm Room
The visits never come when you expect them. Wendy Cramer has spent years now keeping the kettle on for daughters who step out of places she cannot follow, sit at her table for an hour, and step back into the dark. She does not ask where they go. Asking would require them to find words for things her whole life has not prepared her to hear. So she keeps the kettle on instead — and the flowers in the beds, and the rooms ready. The readiness is the only thing she has left that still reaches them.
The only thing she had ever been good at was making rooms that other people felt safe inside. The classroom. The dinner table. The house her husband had built around her. She had believed, for most of her life, that it was enough. Her two daughters grew up inside the warm room she made. One became the woman who kept everything running. The other became the woman who stole because she had noticed what was hidden.
An eldest who found a body. A youngest who lost the man she had built a life with. A slow unravelling that ended, one winter, with both her daughters stepping through a door in a wall that should not have been there — and neither of them coming fully back.
Sometimes, without warning, a door opens and one of her daughters is standing in the kitchen — an hour of tea, an hour of pretending everything is ordinary, and then she is gone again into somewhere her mother cannot follow. She has kept the kettle on. She has kept the flowers in the beds. She has kept the rooms ready. A mother who stops being the warm room has stopped being the door her children can walk back through.
