David had our numbers. I sat on the front step at night waiting for the phone in the red box to ring. I didn’t know what to do with the pain. Sometimes a car would drive up the lane, its headlights passing over me, the glow of red taillights fading on the skin of my hands. Mostly the phone stayed silent. On the few occasions it started ringing, as though pulled from a dream I would go over, swing open the door, pick up the receiver, and press it to my ear. And there was silence, not the silence of an empty line, but the silence of someone listening.

In mid-September, a few weeks before Peter left for Oxford, I saw the family, the ones who owned the manor. Work was being done to make it livable, and they’d come to inspect the progress. Darren was savage because they’d given the job to someone else.

“That’s them, the Calcrafts.” Marcus indicated the four people sitting at the next table in The Sun. The girl was complaining about the food. She was my age, give or take a year, and turning over a salad leaf with her fork.

“Iceberg,” she said witheringly. “Iceberg?” She and her mother were fair. The men were heavier set, the son verging on fat. He looked a bit like Henry VIII, already jowly with a rosebud mouth and red-blond hair. He grinned, showing his teeth, and said something. The girl shrieked with laughter.

“Rob. Alice.” The woman’s eyes slid toward her husband, but he was looking down at his plate as though he couldn’t hear them. The moment he finished eating, he stood up.

“I’ll meet you at the car.”

Alice watched him go, jaw set, eyes ablaze. Her mother murmured something about the pressures of work. The boy, Rob, caught my eye and I looked away. He said something else and both women laughed, his sister with enthusiasm and the mother as though she really shouldn’t.

“Wicked child,” she said, and Rob grinned again and looked straight at me.

When Marcus went to pay, I went to the ladies’. It was down a narrow corridor at the back of the pub. When I came out, Rob was blocking the corridor. I stepped left and so did he. Then right, so did he.

“I could dance like this all night,” he said. He was so close that I could feel his breath on my face. “Made you look. Made you stare. Made you lose your underwear.” He took a step nearer, cast a quick look back over his shoulder. “What is it, gorgeous? Why don’t we scoot into the ladies’ here and you tell me all about it before your gorilla comes looking.”