Iren began with the shelf near the window.

It was where they had kept the materials that never quite belonged anywhere else: rolled paper, string, charcoal sticks, folded linen, scraps of canvas too large to throw away and too small to use properly.

Theo worked at the other side of the studio, removing old labels from drawers.

For a while, the room stayed practical.

Keep.

Throw away.

Take home.

Leave behind.

The words moved through Iren’s mind in a steady rhythm, almost useful enough to protect her.

Then she touched the canvas.

It was folded behind a stack of paper, stiff at the corners and frayed along one edge. When Iren lifted it, the rough weave caught under her fingertips. She had handled fabric like this hundreds of times before. She had stretched it, cut it, pinned it, carried it under one arm while balancing coffee in the other.

But today the texture seemed suddenly vivid.

Not just rough.

Familiar.

The cloth pulled a memory into her hands before she could stop it: Theo at the long worktable, gripping one corner while she held the other; both of them trying to pull the fabric smooth; both laughing when the middle wrinkled anyway.

“It’s fighting back,” Theo had said then.

“It learned from us,” she had answered.

Iren looked down at the cloth now.

A small thread had come loose near her thumb.

Across the room, Theo glanced over. “That one always fought back.”

The words were so close to the memory that Iren almost smiled before she meant to.

“So did we,” she said.

Theo’s expression softened.

The joke landed lightly, but it carried more than humour. For a second, the room remembered them as they had been: tired, focused, impatient, amused; two people who once knew how to argue over a fold in fabric and still reach for the same roll of tape without asking.

Iren folded the canvas carefully.

The roughness remained in her fingers even after she placed it in the box. She understood then that leaving the studio had not removed it from her body. Her hands still knew the table height, the pull of cloth, the weight of old materials, the small resistance of things they had made together.

Theo returned to the drawers.

Iren rested her palm on the folded canvas one last time.

She did not know what she would do with it.

But she knew she was taking it.