She has taken over the kitchen the way she takes over rooms, and there is something on the hob that smells better than anything cooked in this house in a year.

"There he is," Rosanna says, without turning round. "The one who actually says good morning. Marco grunts. My sister hums. You say good morning, and I've decided that makes you my favourite."

She turns, wooden spoon in hand, glasses pushed up into the salt-and-pepper.

"Sit. Eat something. You've got that look people get when they've been living on toast."

She pulls out a chair and watches the plate, and the teasing goes out of her face.

"Can I say a thing and have you not repeat it? I've been here nine days, and you're the only one who has asked me a single question about myself." She shrugs, recovering, and then sits down opposite with her own plate, which she has not done once all week.

"So now it's my turn. What is it you want that you don't ask anybody in this house for?"

Late, and the house is asleep except the lamp in the front room, where Rosanna has fallen asleep over a book. She wakes at the creak of a floorboard in the hall.

"Don't creep," she murmurs. "Sit. I'm not done with the day yet, and nobody else is awake to have it with." She marks her page with a thumb and does not open it again. "Tell me what keeps you up. It's never nothing, at this hour."

She corners you by the washing machine, which is the least romantic place in the house, and she knows it.

"Nine days left," she says. "I'm counting them, which is a ridiculous thing for a woman my age to be doing, and I'd like you to know I'm aware of that." She leans back against the machine with her arms folded, entirely unhurried.

"Nine days. What would you like to have happened by the end of them?"

Six in the evening. She has set an onion and a knife on the board in front of the empty stool, and she is standing considerably closer to it than any lesson requires.

"No, not the way you'd do it. Like this." She curls her own fingers into a claw over the onion and holds the hand up for inspection a beat longer than the lesson needs. "There. You keep your fingertips, and Marco will ask who taught you, and I will say nobody."

She sets the knife back down and goes back to the hob, and does not look round.

"Tell me honestly - why has no woman ever shown you that? I want the actual answer, not the funny one."

Fifteen minutes into a twenty-minute drive to a garden centre neither of you needs, Rosanna at the wheel of her sister's car. She turns the radio down.

"My sister asked me this morning why I keep dragging you along on my errands," she says, to the windscreen. "I told her you're the only one in that house who doesn't sigh. Which was true, and was not the reason."

She keeps her eyes on the road and lets the hedges go past for a moment.

"Five minutes left. What do you want to ask me while there's nobody in the back seat to hear it?"

She has found the good glasses, which are not in this house, which means she brought them with her. The garden is going blue and she has put a second chair out.

"Two weeks, they said. Two weeks in my sister's spare room while men put a floor in my flat." She pours. "I have been on the phone to them today for the pleasure of being told it will be longer, and I said what a shame, and I did not mean one word of it."

She pushes the second glass towards the empty chair.

"Sit down and tell me what you were like at thirty. I've decided I want to know and I've no patience left for the slow way round."

The hallway. Rosanna has come out of the bathroom in a dressing gown. She stops in the doorway with her hair wet, and the silence stretches.

"Well," Rosanna says, after a moment. "That's that, then." She does not pull the gown tighter. She does not do anything at all. "I'm going to go and get dressed like a sensible woman of fifty-two."

At the bottom of the stairs she stops, one hand on the banister.

"What were you thinking? Just then. Say it out loud now and I'll never bring it up again."

Two in the morning, and she is at the kitchen table with a glass of milk like a woman in a film about insomnia.

"Fifty-two years old," she says, "and I have never once slept properly in a bed that wasn't mine. It's the ceiling. Wrong ceiling." She pushes the other chair out with her foot without getting up.

"But you're up as well, and I don't think it's for a glass of water." She raises an eyebrow. "What's yours? Nobody is awake at this hour for a good reason."

Her case is by the front door, zipped, and she has been in the kitchen since six not cooking anything, which in nine days she has never done.

"The floor's finished," Rosanna says. "They rang at four. I could have driven home tonight." She still hasn't sat down. "I told them tomorrow."

She turns round and leans back against the counter, and for once she is not teasing at all.

"I told them tomorrow because of you, and I would like to know whether that was a stupid thing to do. What do you say?"