“Eve,” said Antonio urgently, touching my wrist where it lay on the table, inert and stunned like me. “Forget it. What happened happened. We have to leave it. Just leave it behind. I blame myself.” He smiled the ghost of Maddy’s mischievous smile. “You can too if you want.”

30

Is a worldview the same as a paradigm? Miss Sedge says we have to start seeing human beings as just one small part of everything living on the surface of the earth. Do you think another scientific revolution could discover the afterlife exists and maybe even God (though as I said, I think there could be an afterlife without God)? You said it’s the ridiculous ideas that can lead to discoveries. According to Miss Sedge, if you go the straight route, you get an answer you already know, but if you go the crooked back way, you get something new. She tried it out on Jack and me and we came up with the idea for the animation. I guess that’s art, not science. But maybe it works the same way.

I’ve been so busy. I’m making this animated film. Jack’s helping me on the practical side. I started out doing it for the march, but now I’m doing it mainly for myself. You make a drawing and change it hundreds of times, taking pictures as you go with this software that joins them together. I’m also making a secret animation nobody knows about. It’s really hard to do, but I love it. I want to be an artist if I could do this all day.

No one was in the hallway or the kitchen. I slipped to my room on the carpeted stairs and curled up on the bedspread, longing for Maddy. I had been in contact with her, but only where she smiled at me through his lips and watched me from his eyes. Jewel-like pictures hung at different levels above Philippa’s ivory-painted furniture; a lighter circle on the wallpaper showed where the clock had been. On my first night I had taken it down and stuffed it in a drawer. I never could sleep in a room with a ticking clock.

I rolled on my back, laughed out loud, knew myself to be incurably alone, did not give in to tears. Could the word misunderstanding account for what had happened between us? I blame myself. You can too if you want. Thanks, Antonio. The carved rose from which the light fixture hung had been painted so many times it had no distinct edges. Slowly it spun out the new alternative worlds. Little Maddy and her brothers skipped around us, tugging on their father’s hands . . . Teenage Maddy and her sisters formed a huddle, giggling at us, their parents, the happy outcasts . . .

I found my phone and summoned Robin’s voice into my ear.

“Oh, hello, Ducks.”