The widening arc of sunlight illuminated a comfortable sitting room, pegs scattered around a board where someone had abandoned a game of solitaire. The hush that hung over the house reminded Aristide of an empty film set, or backstage early in the afternoon. A place prepared for drama.

Asiyah stopped at the end of a long corridor, with a door at the other end. Aristide felt laughter threaten, faintly hysterical. If this had been one of his films, he wouldn’t have shot it any differently. Maybe a little dolly zoom to heighten the tension. He certainly felt dizzy staring down the hall.

“I will wait here,” said Asiyah, and retreated to the sofa and the peg solitaire.

“He knows,” said Aristide. “Right? That I’m coming?”

Asiyah nodded once, then pinched a yellow peg from the table and placed it pointedly in a hole.

Aristide hesitated for a moment longer then stepped into the corridor, which stretched before him like taffy until he was, quite suddenly, at the door.

Should he knock? It seemed absurd. But it was a courtesy he expected Cyril had not been granted in some time. And it put off the inevitable that much longer.

When his knuckles struck the wood he checked the blow, then worried it had landed too softly. He was about to knock again, when something rustled behind the door.

Every scrap of air left his lungs.

“Come in.”

Disappointment hollowed him out. The voice wasn’t right. He could hear it in his memory: its warm timbre and smooth tones as rich and lived-in as a cotton velvet smoking jacket, or the curves of heirloom furniture. This voice was hoarse and curt with ragged edges.

The silence stretched, aching, until it was broken by another rustle. This sound Aristide could pinpoint with ease: a newspaper page, insolently turned.

The crackle of paper, timed perfectly, struck a chord: Cyril at the breakfast table, avoiding an awkward question by the turn of another page—the licked thumb, the moment’s pause before the sheet of newsprint swept in front of his face and settled against its fellows. The flash of his eyes in the flicker of paper, like a zoetrope. Sometimes Aristide caught him watching in that slight gap. After, they pretended that their eyes had never met.

When he opened the door, he couldn’t help but stare.

It was certainly Cyril. It had to be. Behind the bulwark of the paper, his eyes were sharp and blue as Aristide remembered them: the center of a candle flame. But now they were rimmed in red and sunk deep in shadow, the thin skin around them stained purple with exhaustion.