Now every once in a while Oliver would reference the moment. He had sent me a link to a video of an old Tampax ad in which a woman roller-skated joyously on a beach. Another time, he’d signed me up to a sponsored parachute jump. A letter had arrived at my flat thanking me for my interest in building schools in Africa. I dropped the book in the trash and opened my email.

There’d been no answer to the thirty or so calls I’d made to Peter’s phone. Nor was there a reply to the string of emails I had sent. Now I typed another: Patricia is worried. It’s time for a turn. And then, as an afterthought, I am worried too. A turn. That was what we called it when it was time for Peter, Em, or Marcus to return home and reassure various parties that they were still alive. A quick turn, I’ll be back after dinner!

Even after I sent the email, I struggled to focus. The office was open plan and from my desk I had a view over the atrium and the desk-bound gatekeepers nineteen floors below. It was a tower, a tower whose music was air filter and fan, rap of heel on polished floor, tap of fingers on keys. There was not a blade of grass or a breeze, not a creature, only a tinny fountain in the marble foyer and a few captive plants, and yet how the shoulders around me hunched over the screens, how the eyes were fixed. We worked long days. Much of the year, we hurried home in the dark and hurried back before it got light, only to find the work was no closer to completion, as though our dreaming selves had unpicked it overnight. It had no magic, but it was not unenchanted. I had come to London when I was twenty-one. Seventeen years it’d been my home. Of those, seven I’d spent here.

Before me, a cursor flickered against a bright white page, empty save for the title Compliance Initiatives in Response to New Regulatory Safeguards. It was my job to write such reports, and shout at traders, and sign off on deals, enforcing the rules of the game that accounted for 11 percent of the UK’s economy. But I did nothing, because I was harried by visions of Peter, not latter-day Peter but original Peter, ur-Peter, on the stone bench in the playground alone, jiggling a foot. Hunted down the corridors by bigger boys for wearing a homemade cape to school. I told myself that Peter was a big boy, able to look after himself, but all I saw was Peter as a small boy, Peter and I chasing raindrops down windowpanes with our fingers on wet days at school, our breath clouding the glass. On very rainy days, they sometimes gave us hot squash. We liked hot squash.