The cake cost thirty-one dollars and came in a box with a ribbon, and Hepzibah looked at it on the counter for a full minute before pronouncing that it was too yellow.

"It's lemon," Dez said.

"Lemon is not yellow. Lemon is pale. This is the yellow of a person who is lying." She lifted the lid and sniffed. "Hm. It smells honest."

"High praise," Bao murmured from the stove, where he was pretending to be busy with a pot of egusi he had been forbidden to touch. He had not slept. He had printed the notice three times and highlighted it in three colours, and the whiteboard behind him now had a new column headed THINGS I CAN DO ABOUT SEVEN DAYS, with only one entry in it, in capitals: BREATHE.

Ama Quartey arrived at six on the dot, which Dez had been told was the only way she arrived at anything. She was sixty-odd, tiny, in a cardigan the colour of a bruise, and she carried a document wallet under one arm and a folding stool under the other, in case the furniture was not up to her standards. She took in the flat in one pass: the air mattress, the sofa bed, the wheelchair folded against the radiator with a fresh dent in its frame. Then she looked up at Dez, a long way up, and did not seem to mind.

"You're the tall one. I've heard of you," she said. "Everyone has. I voted for you in the other meme poll. The one with the potted plant."

"Thank you," Dez said. "I think."

"Where is the paper?"

She took the notice to the kitchen table, set her stool down beside it, though there were four chairs, and read it with a pencil. She hummed while she read. It was a low tuneless sound that Dez, who counted exits for a living, found oddly more alarming than anything the process servers had done.

"Well," Ama said at last. "It's rubbish."

Bao made a noise like a kettle being taken off the heat.

"It's *competent* rubbish. They've cited section nine, which is for abandoned goods, and section fourteen, which is for sub-letting, and neither applies. A guest is not a sub-tenant unless money moves. Is money moving?"

"No," said Bao. "I mean, soup. But no money."

"Soup is not consideration. They've given you seven days when you're owed thirty, and they've served it by a firm rather than a registered post, which is a procedural error, and they've named the wrong guarantor." She turned the page. "Your mother is not a guarantor, I take it."

"She's never seen the lease," Dez said. "She doesn't know about any of it."

"Then she'll be pleased to be asked." Ama put the pencil down. "This isn't a notice, dear. It's a *mood*. It's meant to make you pack. You'll get a proper one in thirty days and a hearing six weeks after that, and in that time you can all stay put, eat cake, and be a nuisance." She looked at the box. "Is that lemon? I'll have a slice."

The relief in the room was physical; Dez felt it go through the floorboards. Bao sat down on the nearest chair as though somebody had cut his strings. Tamar, in the bedroom doorway, let out a breath so long it fluttered the pages on the table.

It lasted until the second slice.

"Now," Ama said, wiping her fingers on a napkin, "why would a company that bought this building three weeks ago want these two out of it so badly it spent a firm's fee on a bluff?"

"Because of the fire," said Bao.

"Because they're witnesses," said Dez.

Hepzibah, who had been eating in silence, put down her fork.

"Mm," she said.

Nobody moved. Dez had not said the word to anyone in the flat. She had not said it to Bao yet, not in those terms, and Tamar looked blank, and Bao looked blank, and Ama merely raised her eyebrows. But Hepzibah's hands had gone flat on the table on either side of her plate, and they were holding on.

"Hepzibah," Dez said gently. "What did you tell them?"

"Who?"

"Whoever asked what you saw that night."

"I told nobody what I saw."

"Gran," Tamar said.

"I *told nobody*." She turned her head and the headscarf shifted, and for the first time since Dez had met her she looked her age, and a little more. "The doctor wanted me to sit. The nurse wanted me to rest. A man came, with a clipboard, with a nice voice. He brought me a tea. In the good cup, not the plastic. He said he was from the insurer, to see to my losses. I had lost everything, so I did not say no."

Ama had gone still. "Which insurer?"

"Sable something."

"Sable Mutual."

"That is the one." Hepzibah pulled her cane across her knees and held it with both hands, as if the room might tilt. "He asked what I remembered. I said, nothing, only the smoke and my granddaughter. And he said, it is very understandable, it is a trauma. He said there was a payment for people in my position. For the inconvenience. He said it was so I would not have to wait for the lawyers. Three thousand five hundred dollars."

Tamar made a small sound.

"I have not seen three thousand five hundred dollars since Amadi died," Hepzibah said, with fierce dignity, to the table. "I signed where he showed me. I did not read it. My glasses were in the building."

There was a silence that had weight in it. Dez found she was counting the cupboard handles, and made herself stop.

"Do you have a copy?" Ama asked. Her voice had not changed at all, which Dez was beginning to understand was how she was at her most careful.

"In the bag."

Tamar brought it. It was the duffel, and at the bottom of the duffel, folded in four inside a plastic sleeve that had once held a hospital wristband, was a sheet of heavy paper with a coffee ring on one corner. Ama unfolded it on top of the lemon cake box and read it as slowly as Dez had ever seen anybody read anything.

"Mm," she said. And then, in an entirely different voice, "Oh, you clever, clever people."

"What is it?" Bao said.

"It's a release. A full and final settlement of any claim arising from the incident at twenty-two Pasadera, with the usual nonsense about confidentiality. Three thousand five hundred. Signed on the ninth of October at 11.06 in the morning, at Floor General, ward four." She read on. "Paragraph six. 'The Claimant agrees to refrain from making statements, written or oral, regarding the cause or origin of the fire to any third party, including the press, any public inquiry, or any advocacy organisation, save as compelled by subpoena.'"

"Floor Rising," Tamar said.

"Among others. And paragraph nine, which is the one I like." Ama's pencil came down on it. "'The Claimant's notice address for all future correspondence shall be Switchback Fourteen, Terrace Six, third floor, being the residence of the Claimant's associate Ms Novak-Obi.' Dated the ninth."

Dez felt it in her stomach before her head caught up.

"On the ninth," she said. "She was in a bed in a ward. Nobody had asked me where she'd go."

"No," Ama said. "But I imagine that someone had asked *her*, over tea, in the good cup. And she answered. Because you had been kind to her."

Hepzibah put her face in her hands.

It was not a loud collapse. There was no sound at all, just the grey line of her shoulders going in, like a house settling. Tamar went to her at once and knelt in front of the armchair with the wheelchair frame between them. Dez stayed where she was. She had stopped, years ago, trusting her hands to do the right thing around a person's grief.

"I did not know," Hepzibah said, into her palms. "I thought he was being polite. I thought he was a kind man, who would see to me."

"He was very good at it," Ama said, not unkindly. "That's his job."

"I have shamed you. I have taken your home and shamed it."

"No, ma'am," said Dez.

"I have."

"You've done the thing anybody would do if somebody was kind at four in the morning. You haven't shamed anyone." She had meant to say more. She found she didn't need to. "Ama. Can it be undone?"

"Possibly. Release obtained from a vulnerable person within hours of trauma, without independent advice, by a party with a financial interest in the outcome? A judge might be unhappy." She tapped the page. "But I can't promise, and I can't do it without the cheque. If she's spent any of it —"

"It's in the sock," said Hepzibah, from behind her fingers.

"The sock."

"The left one. In the drawer." A pause. "I have taken out forty dollars, for the cake."

"The cake was thirty-one dollars," said Dez.

"I added a tip."

Ama laughed. It was a short, bright, surprised sound, and it let some air out of the room; even Tamar half-smiled into her grandmother's knee. Bao got up and put the kettle on, because it was the only thing he knew how to do, and Dez picked up the release and looked at the bottom of it.

The signatures were two. One was Hepzibah's, in a careful, schoolgirl hand with a loop on the H. The other was a witness line, and it was not a name at all. It was a sharp, slanting, deliberate pair of initials, with a flourish under the second one, like an underline that knew it was being looked at.

C. O.

"Who's C.O.?" Bao said, reading over her arm.

"A man with a nice voice," Hepzibah said, her face still hidden. "Very polite. Very tall. He called me *Mrs Ibekwe*. Nobody calls me that. Not since the church." She lowered her hands at last and her eyes were red and absolutely clear. "He asked after you, Adaeze. After the girl who carried us out. He asked if you were well."

In Dez's chest the three small lights went on burning, Tamar at four, Hepzibah at six, Dario somewhere far across the city like a lamp left on in another house.

She had seen those initials once before. Not on a page. In ink, in the visitor book at Larchmont Court, in a column headed *Visitor*, with a flourish under the second letter.

"What's wrong?" Tamar said.

"Nothing," said Dez, in the voice of a woman who has just learned where the nearest exit is, and that someone else has been standing in front of it.

She folded the release along its creases and put it in the pocket with the white card.

"Ama," she said. "How much do you charge for a cake?"