Rachel has come back into the living room. The blanket she’s sharing with her husband has been pulled to the floor, like shed skin, so Ben could go busy himself in the kitchen.

“She’s asleep,” Rachel admits.

“She’s been asleep,” Ben says, and she can hear he’s making them drinks. On the little tables at either end of the sofa are the last knifed continents of pancakes, sitting in syrup like a sticky map of the world. They haven’t had breakfast for dinner for ages. “I don’t think anything happened.”

Rachel sits down in her warmed spot. The screen sits paused at the edge of the blanket. It’s a V4U prototype, one of two in circulation. It’s just another screen with a choice of watchables, but it is testament to how high Ben has risen in the company that he gets the second one. In two years they’ll have another baby, and a much, much bigger house. Their rugs won’t be big enough; they’ll look like towels, skimpy and replaceable, on a beach of hardwood floors. “Nevertheless,” she says.

“I know there’s reason to be worried but there’s nothing, I swear, to be worried about.”

Rachel looks at the blanket, frozen mid-wrinkle like a glacier. “How can you be sure?” she asks him.

“Because,” Ben says, and sighs and works the shaker, trembles it all up until everything is cold, “I know which kid it is.”

“Who? No, I don’t want to know. But if he,” and she stops. It’s just something to say here. An ax has fallen into the middle of her life. It is powerful but it’s left just the tiniest of marks. She knows Reynard was not inappropriate with her child. He was inappropriate with her.

“I think the whole thing was nothing,” Ben says. “The Vic was on it—”

“I can’t believe you still call him that.”

“He was on it all day. Something with his wife—the dead one, the first one—and money from some accounting scheme. Ariel, she’s the real criminal, that’s the real story. That guy Reynard was just a sleaze. The Vic took care of him.”

It’s the was that pings in the room, like a bulb burnt out. “Surely the Vic didn’t,” Rachel says, but she can’t, again, say anything more. Reynard in some shallow grave, stretched out just inches below the grass and the leaves, is something she can conjure up easily. It looks just like him in that rented bed. Ben brings in the drinks crackling with ice in the glasses they hardly use. He is trying very hard, she can see, to make a special evening after a bad day, and she does need a drink.

“You’ll never see him again,” he tells her. “Hide nor hair. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”