The walk home

Eleanor walks slowly, the scarf folded over her arm, no longer clenched in her fist like something rescued. It still carries the faint warmth of the café, the echo of laughter that surprised her, and the shimmer of tears she hadn’t expected. The street is bright in that late-afternoon way that makes colours strangely theatrical. Even the footpath seems to glow, as though it’s been polished in her brief absence. She can’t see the woman but decides to take the long way home just in case.

At the edge of the small park, she pauses. Children run in chaotic lines around the climbing frame, their shrieks bright and unselfconscious. A mother crouches in the mulch, hands gentle on a toddler’s shoulders. The scene is completely ordinary and yet Eleanor feels herself tense, just slightly, as if bracing for a sound she can already hear forming.

At the lights a young father stands rocking a baby against his chest. The rhythm is familiar – unconscious, instinctive, the universal movement of comfort. The baby’s head lays against the man’s shoulder; a small fist curled around the strap of his backpack.

She looks away quickly. It’s fine. It’s nothing. Just noise.

She tucks the scarf into her bag and keeps walking.

It occurs to her – absurdly, unhelpfully – that she should not have taken that photo in the café. Photography complicates things. It makes her pay attention, and paying attention is rarely simple. It means she notices the way people look when they think no one is looking. The way sorrow sits on a person like a second, ill-fitting coat. The way joy is usually much quieter than anyone realises.

About to cross the road she hesitates, though she’s not sure why. There’s nothing unusual about the street: a row of almost identical houses, each one with a neat white fence and garden beds full of roses and lavender. A woman unloads groceries from the back of her car, her dog watching from the porch with solemn concentration. A magpie hops along the power line, considering its prospects. The squealing laughter of young children hangs in the air.

Still, Eleanor stands there longer than she needs to, as though she’s forgotten where she’s going.

It happens sometimes, this pause, this gap between thought and movement, as if her mind needs a moment to catch up.

When it does, she crosses the road and turns left. Past the old stone wall where vines have started their slow, inevitable conquest. Past the primary school with its mural of cheerful stick figures holding hands. Past the house with the yellow door she has always admired. She takes it all in without thinking about it. Light touching the roses, the windows, the silver of the mailbox slots. Everything catches her eye for a moment, then slips back into ordinary.

At her own gate, she stops again. She can see through the front window: the soft shadow of the dining table, the curl of the fern she has somehow kept alive, the familiar slant of afternoon sun across the coloured rugs.

The house has that particular stillness of late day, the sense that everything has paused in anticipation of evening. She fills the kettle, not because she wants tea, but because the sound of it boiling feels like proof that everything’s under control.

She wanders to the window, laying the scarf on the table beside her. The sky is shifting, the light thinning, blue deepening at the edges. She can see her own face faintly superimposed over the street outside. It’s always a jolt, that moment where she looks almost like someone else. Slightly older, slightly softer, the glass revealing more of her than she wants to know.

The kettle clicks off.

She makes tea, then lowers herself into the chair. The scarf lies on the table, folded loosely, looking almost like a small sleeping thing.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ she mutters, pushing the thought away and turning to the window.

She doesn’t want to think about the café woman anymore. Or toddlers at the park. Or the father’s rocking motion – a motion that has lived in her body for decades.

She picks up her camera. To test the light. To reassure herself she can still see clearly.

She frames the shot and presses the shutter button.

The image appears on the screen: the scarf, the chair, the soft dimming light behind it. Ordinary things. And yet, something about the frame unsettles her. She can’t put her finger on it, just a sense that the picture feels heavier than it should. Like it’s holding more than fabric and light.

She lowers the camera.

Her breathing has gone shallow again. She forces it deeper. Steadier.

It’s nothing, she tells herself. You’re tired. You’re being foolish. It’s only a scarf. Only a photograph. Only a woman you barely know. Only a moment you read too much into.

She sips her tea in the growing quiet, aware of something she can’t quite name sitting just out of reach.

She lifts the scarf, folds it once, folds it again, her hands moving with the same slow care she once used to settle a restless infant. She places it carefully in the drawer of the sideboard. For safekeeping, she tells herself. For later. For something.

She closes the drawer and stands there, her hand still resting lightly on the wood, her reflection fading in the darkening glass.

She can’t explain it. She doesn’t try.

But something in her has shifted.