Rex writes back, Delighted. Sounds like you arrive during school hours, Hillary will meet you, and March passes, and April. Zeno lays out his one suit, his green-striped tie. Mrs. Boydstun trembles at the bottom of the stairway in her robe. “You’re not really going to leave a sick woman by herself? What kind of man are you?”

Out his bedroom window a blue helmet of sky is fixed above the pines. He shuts his eyes. Years pass in a blink now, Rex wrote. How much more is written in the spaces between the lines? Go now or forever hold your tongue.

“It’s eight days in all.” Zeno buckles his suitcase. “I’ve loaded the cupboards. Got extra cigarettes too. Trish has promised to look in on you every day.”

He burns so much adrenaline during the flights that by the time he gets off in Heathrow, he is practically hallucinating. Outside passport control he looks for an Englishwoman; instead a six-foot-six man with prematurely silver hair and apricot-colored pants that flare at the calf seizes his forearm.

“Oh, you are a little box of cocoa,” says the giant, and air-kisses both of Zeno’s cheeks. “I’m Hillary.”

Zeno clutches his suitcase, trying to comprehend. “How did you know I was me?”

Hillary shows his canines. “Lucky guess.”

He plucks Zeno’s suitcase from his grasp and marshals him through the crowds. Beneath a blue vest, Hillary wears what looks like a peasant’s blouse with sequins randomly applied to the sleeves. Are his fingernails painted green? Is a man allowed to dress like this here? Yet, as Hillary’s boots clip-clop across the terminal, as they weave into a crush of buses and taxis, no one pays much mind. They clamber into a pocket-sized wine-colored two-door, something called an Austin 1100, Hillary insisting on holding the door for Zeno, then walking around the rear of the little car and folding his long body behind the right-hand drive, knees practically in his teeth as he works the pedals, his hair brushing the roof, and Zeno tries not to hyperventilate.

London is smoke-gray and endless. Hillary chatters: “Brentford on your right, old dunghead boyfriend lived right over there, big, disobedient nipper. Rex finishes school in one hour, so we’ll surprise him at home. That’s Gunnersbury Park there, see?”

Parking meters, creeping traffic, soot-stained facades. Wrigley’s Spearmint Gold Leaf One of the Great Cigarettes Ales Spirits and Wines. They park outside a sun-deprived brick house in Camden. No gardens, no hedges, no warbling greenfinches, no matronly wife with teacups. A leaflet glued by rain to the sidewalk reads, The easy way to pay. “We go up,” Hillary says and bends through the doorway like a mobile tree. He carries Zeno’s suitcase up four flights, his long strides skipping every other stair.