“Well enough. I don’t mind her. She’s no trouble. Not like you lot.”

“That’s a rough thing to say.”

They are beginning to annoy me. I cannot keep them out of the text. Everything around me is going into the text—every dust mote, every scuff upon the floor, the unevenness of this desk, the clouded quality of the windows. I cannot keep it out right now.

Flame or not, at my party, Mary Sabon wore dark green. She almost always wore dark green. She might as well have been a shrub or a tree or a tree trunk.

Ignoring my presence—something she would have done at her peril in the old days—she said, “Duncan Shriek? Why, Duncan is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he is still alive, that is.”

As she said this, she turned and looked right at me.

I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the venom in my eyes. Then I walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face. The impact shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown.

If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she hurt herself as well.

But I was not done. Not by half. I had just begun.

What did I do? You’ll find out soon enough. Jump pages. Jump time. Skip through the rest as if it were a park pathway on a Sunday afternoon, and you eager to feed the ducks at the far end, in Voss Bender Memorial Square. But I haven’t written the path yet, and you’d get lost without it—and, paper cuts aside, I’ll find ways to make you wait. Waiting is good. I’ve been waiting for over five days now. I know something about waiting. And afterwords.

“I say again: What’s she typing in there? Clack-clack-clack—it’s disturbing my peace of mind.”

“Wasn’t her brother the writer?”

“Obviously not the only one in the family.”

“You must be new to this conversation.”

“What’s she writing, do you think?”

“The story of your life, Steen. A history of the Cappans. How should I know?”

“Whatever it is, it must be important. To her.”

Pickled eyes in pickled light. A glimpse of cheddar-wedge nose.

“Funny. It’s like an echo. It falls away when we stop talking.”

…

“See. No typing. Do you think she’s…?”