Anton listens to their footsteps descending, feels the heat of blood pulsing angrily into his brain. On the floor, the dress lies in a pool of patterned silk.

The boyfriend is a problem.

Even when he’s not around, when he’s away on his bicycle, or flogging the dead horse of his acting career, still his disapproval and suspicion hover over them.

Sometimes when Leah is with Anton there will come the slam of a door downstairs, and Anton has to watch her scurrying away from him, down into the garden, like a nervous rabbit. And then he is left alone to ponder the empty rooms of his house, the cavernous spaces of his heart, while up through the floorboards come sounds of life downstairs. Music, laughter, voices – it stirs the envy inside him. Sometimes, the child stays over with them, and Anton hears the crash of toys, the electronic noise of video games. He stands at his window and watches them in the garden, father and son, wrestling together, conducting some kind of savage game, yelping and squealing with delight. This boy looks no more than six or seven, he thinks. And when he remembers that this is the age Mark was when Anton was sent to prison, he has to turn away from the window, the scene in the garden too painful to observe.

He tries to occupy himself, begins clearing out the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen. Sheaves of envelopes containing old bills, old bank statements. Progress reports for Mark from kindergarten. Hospital notes from both of Charlotte’s pregnancies. Certificates of interest. Investor reports. Scatterings of business cards, yellowed with age. One he finds is crisp and white, the name and numbers embossed in new-looking print. Anton presses the edge of the card to his chin, an idea turning over in his mind.

I wonder, he thinks.

When Anton was in the hospital, Mark had brought him a laptop. ‘It’s an old one of mine,’ his son had said, ‘but it still works. I thought maybe you could use it.’

It had lain there, untouched, through the drift of days he had spent in the ward. But since his return home, he’s had cause to use it more and more. He’s even hooked it up to a little printer, and now, with this new idea gaining heat in his brain, Anton flips it open, clicks on the internet icon. His search does not easily yield a result, and the evening light grows faint as he scrolls down, rethinking the parameters of his search, calculating dates, trying and trying again. He forgets to eat, engrossed in the quest. When at last he finds what he is looking for, selecting the print command, the summertime sounds of evening have all faded, and there is only the distant noise of occasional traffic and the hum of paper feeding through the printer.