But it felt right, too. Freshly mown fields beneath scudding clouds and a blue sky? That was the domain of a different man. A boy, even. How often had he come back to Carmody since school? And it had never been an idyll, then; it had been an imposition. Fraught holidays with aging parents. Then one funeral, and another. A miserable week lying low after the election in Nuesklend.

That was his last memory of the place: dogged by his failure and treachery, wandering empty rooms, sniffling and sneezing amidst the dust sheets as a late spring cold snap froze buds from the fruit trees. No family, no staff. Even the groundskeeper was away—with the remaining DePauls scattered, she only came up from the village one week out of three. Cyril hardly remembered the house lived-in.

A small cluster of cars had gathered in the field that passed for a runway. Unlike the other four passengers, Cyril didn’t put his forehead to the window; didn’t peer into the gray evening, growing grayer, to look for friends or family or a chauffeur. It would all be on him soon enough.

Likewise, he let the other four shuffle out ahead of him, wrapping their mufflers more tightly as the bitter wind made its way into the airplane cabin. As if it hadn’t been freezing already.

He didn’t have an overcoat, or hat or gloves. His joints had gone stiff in the chill high altitude, his fingers and toes numb. As a consequence, the cold bothered him very little now. And without a coat he cut, he realized too late, a somewhat more striking figure at the head of the stairs than he would have preferred.

Lillian, standing at the front fender of a shining black car, put her hand to the hood and took a step back when she saw him. She didn’t cover her mouth, or gasp that he heard. She might merely have been shifting her weight. But even a decade out, he knew his sister. This, in her, was a dead faint in a lesser being.

She wore a tightly belted camel coat, the collar turned up against the wind. In the last photograph he had seen—she had been holding Stephen on one knee, both of them in summer clothes—her hair had been cut in a chin-length bob. Longer now, it was swept into a twist at the back of her head, drawing her features up so she seemed to stare haughtily down her nose.

All she needed was black robes and a pair of spectacles, and it would be his mother standing there, ready to pass judgment.

She met him at the bottom of the stairs and first took his face between her palms. This close he could see that her hair, like his, had begun to show threads of platinum white. Her red-rimmed eyes were framed by fine lines. Powder covered her dark circles poorly.