At eight o’clock he accepted that he had been stood up. Leaving the food on the table, he took the bottle of wine and retreated to his study. He was a little surprised to find that his feelings were hurt, that he was actually thinking thoughts along the lines of, Doesn’t she know how much work I put into that dinner? When he thought these things, it was his mother’s voice he heard saying them. Had she ever really done so, he wondered, or was it only natural to think of her because he associated cooking with motherhood?

Then he recalled a night when he was perhaps ten. Caught up in a game of kickball, he’d forgotten to be home at his usual time. Arriving almost an hour late, he’d found his mother scraping his untouched plate into the garbage. Despite his apologies, she’d refused to let go of her anger, telling Ben that such ungratefulness wasn’t to be tolerated. He’d appealed to his father, who in a rare instance of deference to his wife, had agreed that Ben should be sent to his room without his supper. It had seemed grossly unfair to Ben, and he’d spent the night planning in great detail how, as soon as his parents were asleep, he would run away and take up residence in the fort he and some friends had built from cardboard boxes in the nearby woods. Ultimately his anger had fallen prey to his weariness, and he’d fallen asleep. In the morning there had been breakfast as usual, and no one mentioned his crime of the previous evening.

Caddie isn’t a little boy, he reminded himself. She’s sixteen. She should be able to get home for dinner. Part of him wanted to invent excuses for her, mostly because he didn’t want to think that her absence had anything to do with how she felt about him. He preferred to think that she’d become engrossed in some local attraction, even that she’d forgotten the address, than that she was deliberately snubbing his attempt to thaw the divide between them.

Maybe she left, he considered. Thinking of his own aborted escape attempt, he got up and went to her room to see if she’d packed up and gone elsewhere, to whatever fort of her own she preferred to living with him. But her clothes were still in the closet, her books and CDs stacked on the bedside table. She was still there.