The Weeks We Share

At eight forty-five on Sunday, June sat cross-legged on the rug in Mara’s apartment and tried to force the zip on her rabbit-print case.

“It’s stuck,” she said.

“It isn’t stuck.” Mara knelt beside her. “You’ve caught the sleeve.”

June held up the sleeve of the yellow cardigan she had packed around the teeth of the zip. “I need it.”

“You’ll need it less if it comes out with half the wool missing.” Mara eased the knit free, then drew the zip closed. The rabbit’s ears met in the middle. “There.”

June did not take the case. Her hair lay in two uneven plaits across the back of her sweatshirt. Mara had redone them after breakfast, then June had objected to the blue bobble on the left because Simon liked the red ones better. Mara had changed it without comment. Now there was a red bobble on each plait, a tiny concession that annoyed her more than it should have.

The kitchen table still held the remains of their breakfast: June’s toast crusts, a mug with cold tea in it, the paper calendar Mara used for the custody weeks despite the identical version on her phone. This was Mara’s Sunday. Next Sunday would be hers too, after seven nights during which Simon would have June. The arrangement had been written down in the divorce agreement in neutral language, week on and week off, collection at ten, school bags exchanged at the receiving parent’s home. It looked clean in print.

In practice, it required lists.

“Meds are in the front pocket,” Mara said. “The inhaler’s still there, though you haven’t needed it. Your reading book is in the side pocket. Your trainers are by the door.”

June stared at the rabbit case.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard.”

Mara reached for June’s chin, then stopped before touching her. “Dad will read with you tonight. You can tell him about the planets project.”

“I told him on Friday.”

“Then you can tell him what you decided about it.”

June looked up. Her face carried no tears, only the guardedness Mara had come to recognise as the beginning of a handover. At seven, June seemed to understand that an adult wanted cheerfulness from her and had begun to offer a version that was careful and late.

“Could you come in?” she asked.

Mara glanced toward the window. Rain had washed the pavement clean overnight. Across the street, a man wheeled a bicycle past the pharmacy, its tyres making soft lines through the wet. “I usually don’t.”

“Just for a little bit.”

Mara thought of Simon’s narrow hallway, of the photographs that had remained on his walls after he moved into the flat near Place Royale. June in a paddling pool. Simon’s mother at their wedding. A framed black-and-white print of the Loire that Mara had bought in a market and no longer wanted back.

“You can come to the door with me,” Mara said. “Then Dad takes over.”

June’s thumb went to the edge of her lower lip. “What if I don’t want him to?”

The answer came too quickly, polished by repetition. “You love Dad, and Dad loves you. You’ll have a good week.”

June nodded because Mara had given her the line expected of her. Then she lifted the rabbit case by its handle and dragged it down the short hall.

Mara collected June’s trainers, the green backpack, and the lunchbox June had forgotten to empty after Saturday’s swimming lesson. In the bathroom mirror, she saw herself in dark jeans and the cream jumper she wore when she needed to look composed. Her hair was tucked behind her ears. She looked like a woman leaving for a meeting, not a mother preparing to hand over her child for seven days.

“Coat,” she called.

June put it on without protest. That worried Mara more than tears would have.

They walked to Simon’s because he lived twelve minutes away, across Rue Crébillon and through the edge of the square. They could have taken the tram, but the walk had become part of the routine. June counted the black iron posts along the pavement. Mara carried the backpack. At the corner by the bookshop, June slipped her fingers into Mara’s palm.

“You can call me whenever you want,” Mara said.

“Dad says I know that.”

The words were casual. June was watching the puddles, choosing dry patches in her pink trainers. Mara felt a small pull low in her stomach.

“What else does Dad say?”

June shrugged. “That I shouldn’t make you sad.”

Mara stopped beside the closed shutters of a florist. A delivery van passed, sending a light spray from the gutter over the kerb. June looked at her, immediately alert.

“Did he say I was sad?” Mara asked.

“I don’t know.”

Mara could hear how the question had landed, too sharp for a child’s loose report of an adult’s conversation. She crouched, though damp grit pushed through the knee of her jeans.

“You don’t have to look after my feelings, June.”

June’s expression changed in the way it did when she was asked to understand something larger than she could hold. “But if I’m happy at Dad’s, you might miss me.”

“I will miss you. Missing you doesn’t make me sad in a bad way.” Mara kissed her cool cheek. “It means I love you.”

“Will you be okay here on your own?”

“Yes.” Mara stood and picked up the backpack. “I’ll go to work tomorrow. I’ll make dinner. I might watch something very boring.”

June gave a brief smile. “You always watch boring things.”

“That is an unfair generalisation.”

They walked on. Mara did not ask another question. She had learned that questions made June search for an answer she thought would please whichever parent stood nearest. Simon said Mara overthought things. Mara suspected he meant that she remembered them.

Simon opened the door before they reached the buzzer. He wore grey jogging trousers and a navy T-shirt, barefoot on the tiled floor. The smell of coffee came from inside his flat, along with the bright, manufactured music of a children’s programme.

“There she is,” he said, smiling at June. “My girl.”

June went still at Mara’s side.

Simon’s smile stayed in place. He bent toward her. “Come on, sweetheart. I’ve got pain au chocolat. Proper ones from the bakery, not the wrapped ones.”

“I had breakfast.”

“You can have one later.” He held out his arm.

June put her hand around Mara’s wrist.

Mara shifted the backpack from her shoulder. “She’s got her school things. Her inhaler is in the front pocket. We finished the library book, but it needs to go back on Thursday.”

Simon did not take the bag. He watched June’s grip on Mara. “You all right, Junie?”

June pressed her face into Mara’s side.

“It’s a changeover,” Mara said. Her voice sounded calm, which was its own kind of work. “She needs a minute.”

“A minute, of course.” Simon crouched in the doorway. “But it’s Dad’s week, remember? We’ve talked about that.”

“I know.” June’s answer came muffled through Mara’s jumper.

Simon looked up at Mara. “She seems a bit upset.”

“She’s not upset. She’s reluctant. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” He spoke softly, almost kindly. “She’s seven, Mara. She doesn’t need us defining what she feels.”

Mara felt heat rise along her throat. “I’m not defining it. I’m saying this happens at every handover.”

“It hasn’t happened like this with me.”

June lifted her head at that. “I’m sorry.”

Simon’s face altered at once. He touched June’s hair. “No, sweetheart. Nobody said you’d done anything wrong.” Then he looked at Mara again. “Maybe she picks up on how hard you find it.”

The hallway was too narrow to move without brushing the shoe cabinet. Mara could see into the sitting room: June’s old cushion on the sofa, a wooden train set spread across the rug, the familiar blue cup waiting on the coffee table. Simon had made a place for her here. Mara knew that. Knowing it did not make the transfer clean.

“I’m fine,” Mara said.

“You’re never fine on Sundays.”

June watched them. Mara saw the exact second when her daughter began to listen for danger, her small face attentive in a way no child should have to be.

Simon saw it too. He straightened. “This is what I mean. She worries. She notices that you’re unsettled, and then she thinks she needs to stay close.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“I’m not attacking you.” He lowered his voice further. “I’m asking whether we can make this easier for her.”

The old trap sat in the words, so familiar that Mara could identify every part of it while still stepping into it. If she resisted, she became the parent who cared more about being right than about June’s comfort. If she gave way, Simon got to decide what June’s feelings meant.

June’s fingers tightened around Mara’s wrist.

“Can Mum stay?” she asked.

Simon glanced past Mara into the communal stairwell. “Mum has things to do.”

Mara had a coffee booked with a colleague at eleven, then laundry, then an empty afternoon she had planned to fill with practical tasks so there would be no space for the familiar ache. None of that mattered against June’s face.

“I can stay for ten minutes,” she said.

Simon’s expression suggested he had expected no less. “If you think that’s best.”

He took the backpack and set it on the floor beside the shoe cabinet. June did not let go of Mara until they were in the sitting room. Mara sat on the end of the sofa while June arranged the wooden tracks into a loop that did not quite connect. Simon returned to the kitchen. He called that there was fresh coffee, as if they were a family on an ordinary Sunday morning.

Mara checked the time. Ten thirteen.

June held up a curved piece of track. “This bit won’t fit.”

“It goes after the bridge,” Mara said.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You’re right.” Mara took it, turned it round, and laid it beside the station piece. “There.”

June looked from the track to Mara. “Will you come tomorrow after school?”

“Tomorrow’s Monday. You’ll be with Dad.”

“But could you?”

Simon came in carrying two mugs. He set one in front of Mara, then paused. “June, Mum has work. She can’t keep coming over when it’s my time.”

“I could pick her up one day this week,” Mara said, before she had decided to say it.

Simon put his mug down. “That might confuse things.”

June’s face fell.

Mara heard herself rush to repair it. “We’ll talk on the phone after school instead. And I’ll see you Friday at swimming, if Dad agrees.”

“Of course,” Simon said. “I’d never stop you seeing her.”

The sentence sat between them. Mara picked up her coffee, although she did not drink it.

At ten twenty-six, Simon checked his phone. “You should go. It’s better if we keep the goodbye short.”

Mara looked at June. “Can I have a hug?”

June climbed into her lap with a force that tipped Mara back against the sofa. Her hair smelled of children’s shampoo and the rain-damp hood of her coat. Mara kept her arms around her for several breaths, counting them because there had to be an end.

“I love you all the way to Friday,” she said.

“Further,” June replied.

“Further than that.”

When Mara stood, June grabbed the hem of her jumper.

Simon put a hand lightly on June’s shoulder. “Come and show me where the station goes.”

Mara kissed June’s forehead. Then she walked through the hall without looking back, because looking back would turn departure into a question and because Simon would be watching to see whether she managed it.

On the landing, she heard June begin to cry.

Mara stayed where she was, fingers on the chipped banister. Through the door, Simon said something too low to make out. June’s crying rose, then broke into small uneven breaths.

She could go back in. She could tell Simon he was wrong about the track, the phone call, the way he named every tremor in June as proof of Mara’s failure. She could take June home, put the rabbit case back in its place, postpone the week until it became impossible to postpone anything.

Her phone showed ten twenty-nine.

Mara went down the stairs.

By Monday morning, the wet pavement had dried. Mara crossed the Île de Nantes with her laptop in her backpack and a paper cup of coffee cooling through its lid. The tram rattled over the bridge behind her. To her left, the crane on the riverbank stood where it had stood throughout June’s childhood, yellow against the pale sky, useful only as a landmark when Mara and June lost each other in crowds.

The office occupied the fourth floor of a converted warehouse near the river. Mara had worked for Kestrel Systems for nine years, long enough to remember when the company had occupied half this space and stored spare monitors under desks. It now built logistics software for firms that wanted their routes, warehouses, and inventory to speak to each other without human beings spending half the day correcting what the systems failed to understand.

At her desk, she opened her laptop and found a message from Simon.

June was fine after you left. Took her a while to settle. I think we should be careful about making departures too drawn out.

Mara read it twice. There was no accusation that could be pointed to. Simon had learned, over the years, to make concern sound like cooperation.

She began a reply.

She was tired. It was a normal goodbye. Please don’t discuss it in front of her.

She deleted the second sentence. Then the first.

Thanks. I’ll keep it brief next time.

Her thumb hovered over send. She sent it anyway.

At nine thirty, Camille appeared at the end of Mara’s desk with a tablet tucked against her chest. “Conference room B in five. Paris people are here.”

“Which Paris people?”

“Reed Freight. Their chief executive, apparently. They have the new warehouse outside Angers, and no confidence in the dashboard we delivered.”

“We delivered a dashboard that does what they asked.”

Camille smiled. “Then you can explain that to a man who owns too many scarves.”

Mara shut her laptop. “Is that in the briefing?”

“It is now.”

Conference room B faced the river. Four people from Kestrel had taken seats around the table, along with a woman from Reed Freight whom Mara recognised from video calls. She was named Amina Ghali and worked in operations. At the far end sat a man Mara had not met.

He stood when she entered.

“Daniel Reed,” he said.

His handshake was firm and brief. He wore a dark blue shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist, no jacket, no conspicuous scarf. His hair was grey at the temples, cut close enough to look practical rather than fashionable. “You’re Mara Ellis. Amina says you know the integration better than anyone in this room.”

Mara glanced at Amina. “Amina is generous.”

“Amina is usually precise,” Daniel said.

It was a plain reply. Mara took the empty seat opposite him.

The meeting began with a slide full of red numbers. Marcel from sales explained the delays at the Angers site in patient, padded phrases. Amina interrupted twice to correct dates. Daniel did not appear embarrassed by the corrections. He wrote in a small notebook, asked for the original figures, and waited until Marcel finished.

Then he turned to Mara.

“Can you tell me why the drivers’ arrival times keep moving after they’ve checked in?”

No one had asked it that directly. Mara clicked open the technical view on the screen.

“The arrival times aren’t moving,” she said. “The warehouse timestamps are.”

Amina leaned forward. “How?”

“The handheld scanners are connecting when the drivers enter the yard, not when they reach the loading bay. The system treats that signal as a check-in because that’s the instruction Reed Freight gave us in the configuration workshop.”

Marcel shifted in his chair. “The client needed visibility from the gate.”

“They do have visibility from the gate,” Mara said. “They also have a status label that says check-in, which means something different to the warehouse team. It looks as though drivers are waiting longer than they are.”

Daniel looked at the screen, then at Amina. “Can we change the label?”

“Yes,” Mara said. “We can call it yard entry. Then we capture loading bay arrival separately. Your figures will stop contradicting the people on the floor.”

“Why wasn’t that proposed at the start?” Daniel asked.

Marcel began, “The project scope,” at the same time Amina said, “We assumed.”

Daniel held up his pen. “I’m not asking to assign blame. I’m asking because I’ve spent two weeks hearing that my staff are resistant to the system, and it sounds as though we gave them a system that describes their work inaccurately.”

Mara watched him make a note beside a page filled with close, neat writing. Most executives she met at Kestrel either wanted comfort or a culprit. Daniel appeared to want an answer he could use.

“The configuration can be changed,” she said. “But people will need to know why the old figures looked wrong. Otherwise they’ll think we’ve altered the data.”

“Can you put that explanation together?”

“Yes.”

“Not a sales explanation,” he said. “The real one.”

A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “I’ll do my best.”

For the first time, Daniel smiled. It changed him less than she expected. “I’d prefer your best to anyone else’s reassurance.”

The meeting continued. Mara spoke more than she usually did with clients in the room. She explained the timing fault, the cleanest route to a correction, and the two-day test they would need before anyone could trust the altered reporting. Daniel asked questions when he did not understand. He did not pretend otherwise. By the end, the red slide had been replaced by a short list of actions, and Marcel had stopped trying to talk over her.

When chairs scraped back and laptops snapped shut, Mara felt the lightness that came after a useful meeting. It startled her. The feeling had nothing to do with June, Simon, or whether she had handled the goodbye correctly. It had come from knowing something and saying it aloud.

Camille caught Mara by the coffee machine after the meeting.

“Not bad,” she said. “For someone who apparently has a private career in making warehouse workers feel seen.”

“I corrected a label.”

“You corrected Marcel in front of a client. I’ll be dining out on it for weeks.”

Mara pressed the button for black coffee. “He was wrong.”

“He often is. He usually gets to be wrong in complete sentences.”

Her phone vibrated against the counter. Simon again.

June asked if you could call at six instead of after school. She’s tired today.

Mara checked the time. Eleven forty-seven. The message did not require an answer for hours. Still, her body reacted as if someone had called her name across a crowded room.

Camille saw the screen, then looked away. “Everything okay?”

“June’s with her dad this week.”

“Ah.” Camille filled her own mug. She had met Simon once at a Kestrel Christmas party, before the divorce. “You can always take the call from the small room if you need quiet.”

“I know.”

Mara typed, Six is fine. Tell her I love her.

She deleted Tell her I love her. It seemed too heavy to send through Simon, as though it required a reply.

Six is fine, thanks.

She set the phone face down on the counter.

Daniel Reed stood near the doorway with his notebook in his hand. Mara had not heard him approach. He looked towards the phone, then back at her face without any show of curiosity.

“Ms Ellis,” he said. “Do you have ten minutes?”

“Probably.”

“I’d like you to stay after lunch, if you can.” He glanced through the glass wall at the conference room, where Marcel was already gathering papers into a leather case. “There’s a problem in this project that nobody has named yet, and I want your view on it.”

Daniel’s tone held no invitation to perform, no hint that he wanted her to agree with him. Mara looked at the phone lying dark beside the coffee machine, then at the man who had asked for the answer rather than the comfort of one. “All right,” she said. “I’ll stay.”