“Except that we did know,” I said. “Keep that in mind. Tell me something, Conor—and remember, no bullshitting. You were jealous as hell, weren’t you? Of the Spains. Of Pat.”

Conor shook his head, an impatient jerk like he was shaking off a fly. “No. You’re not getting it. Same as the stuff when we were eighteen: it wasn’t the way you mean.”

“Then what way was it?”

“I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, ever. I just … I know I gave them shit about doing what everyone else did. But when I started watching them …”

A long breath. The heating had cut off again. Without its hum the room felt silent as a vacuum; the thin sounds of our breathing were sucked into that silence, dissolved away to nothing. “From the outside their life looked exactly like everyone else’s, something out of some nightmare clone film. But once you saw it from the inside, you saw … Like, Jenny used to put on the same idiot fake-tan shite that all the girls use, make herself look exactly like everyone else—but afterwards she’d bring the bottle into the kitchen, and her and the kids would get little paintbrushes and draw on their hands. Stars or smiley faces, or their initials—once she put tiger stripes all up Jack’s arms; he was over the moon, being a tiger all week. Or after the kids were in bed Jenny’d be tidying up their crap, her and every other housewife in the world, only sometimes Pat would come give her a hand and they’d end up playing with the toys—like they’d be having a fight with the stuffed toys, and laughing, and when they got tired they’d lie on the floor together and look out the window at the moon. From up there, you could see they were still them. Still who they were when we were sixteen.”

Conor’s arms had loosened; his hands were cupped on the table, palms upturned, and his lips had parted. He was watching some slow procession of images move past a lit window, faraway and untouchable, glowing richly as enamel and gold.

“Nights last longer, when you’re outside on your own. You get to thinking strange things. I could see other lights, in other houses across the estate. Sometimes I heard music—someone used to play old rock ’n’ roll, top volume; someone else had a flute, used to practice. I started thinking about all the other people living there. All those different lives. Even if they were all just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid’s favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant … Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own. Loving someone all their own. Every time I was up there, it hit me harder. That kind of life: it’s beautiful, after all.”

Conor caught another deep breath and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. He said, “That’s all. Not jealous. Just … that.”