Lady Ostlet is constantly looking out the window, Downing realizes, and it is not long before it becomes obvious that the woman is eager to get to the matter at hand, and the matter at hand is, of course, the absence of her husband, Sir Richard.

Downing is polite. He waits for a pause in the conversation before clearing his throat. He asks delicately, with care, but not so much care as to appear probing:

“Where is your husband?”

Rebecca Ostlet lowers her head and stares through the rose bundles tipping neatly in the Oriental vases stationed in her front windows. She is gazing forlornly at the brick side of Gloucester Walk, and Downing now worries: while he is donning his usual gloomy black, the short frock coat which has long been his preference, he also displays on his person the smooth front of a white linen shirt, a textured brown brocade for a waistcoat, matching Windsor scarf, and when he arrived at the flat, he removed his round, gray-ribboned Gambler, his beaver-skin gloves—but there is nothing on Rebecca Ostlet that is not black, and women, they wear full black only in mourning, and so something must have happened to his close friend, he coldly deduces, and this, whatever has happened, is the reason why Lady Ostlet has invited him to London, to share some kind of bad news, and if it is true, Downing wishes she could have just written it, for the love of Christ, for what’s the point in receiving bad news in person when people like to grieve in private, and he barely knows this woman, and if the news is as bad as he thinks, it will be downright rotten for him because Rebecca Ostlet cannot know how close he and Richard were; how they had been first acquainted in a custodial closet at the Great Exhibition nearly a quarter century past when Downing was sixteen, Ostlet twenty-five, forging a fast friendship over their mutual interest in naturalism: Ostlet, an academic on the side of Mammalian Behavior, and Downing, a budding artist on the side of the Study and Preservation of Species—and there is even a small part of Downing that had imagined retiring somewhere close to Ostlet when the time came.

But then Sir Richard Ostlet went and married Rebecca Green, a woman half his age. He was talking about having children. As Downing was eagerly anticipating even quieter years ahead, Ostlet was eagerly anticipating some kind of comic re-creation of a youth he never had, and what man at the age of fifty, Downing is thinking, would want to have a child, when the slim botanist at long last looks away from her windows, turns toward him and asks with shocking directness:

“Mr. Downing, do you believe in life after death?”

* * *

The Parkway, it is empty as you are scrolling your phone for the number of Tabitha Castle, daughter of the one and only Brian Castle, tech billionaire, and she is a tough, cheeky girl you have dated in the past who goes by, adorably, “Toby.” Toby Castle is turning twenty-nine this year and you are turning thirty-five this year, and you and Toby always have a good enough time together, and you like seeing Toby, so you are going to pursue Toby.