We watched the lights of the police car pull away, blinking red between the trees. After a while, I said, “You aren’t, though.”

“I suppose all this is yours,” he said, instead of answering.

Whether my mother never existed on paper, officially, or my father had left everything to me, that was another reason my mother had needed me. My mother, already fraying in my mind to only a fall of flowers, white on the ground.

I looked at the shed, full of secrets. Ours and others’. Possibilities, cut short and waiting. Gary followed my gaze.

“Let’s burn it,” I said. “All of it.”

We dragged a good part of the rubbish—stinking, clattering and yielding—from behind the shed up against its walls, and set it on fire: me with an eye on Gary in case he collapsed. My throat was burning and my scabbing cuts kept breaking open. The house was easier to light.

The night was cold on our backs, on my bare shoulders, but we stayed warm watching to make sure the fires didn’t get away. The shed collapsed in foul smoke, and the house folded down off its stilts almost with a sigh. The sparks went up to the stars.

“Don’t you wonder what was in there?” Gary said, wistfully, when it was far too late.

“I’m trying not to.”

“My family thinks there are three types of people in the world,” he said, and counted them off on his fingers. “Ones who can’t, or haven’t, or don’t want to see … things. The Aberdeens, for instance. Mr Alleman. Two: families who know what’s going on—”

“Like the Damsons?”

He shrugged, apologetic. “It’s what my gran says. We’re charged with keeping things on an even keel.”

A hint of grandiosity in those words. I said drily, “Charged by whom?”

“Ourselves, I think. And number three: People Who Meddle.” With a rueful expression at the smoke rising from my father’s notes, my brother’s experiments, he added, “I’m afraid if I look, I’ll find those last two are sides of the same coin.”

“What type am I, Gary Damson?” I asked.

He was silent a while, fading firelight turning his face into a mask. “I don’t know,” he said at last. Not since we were very young had I heard him sound lost.

“Whatever it is,” I said, “let’s get you home.”

“I’m afraid of the dark,” I lied as we stopped at the gate, when what I wanted to say was I killed my mother, Gary. When he stepped into the ghastly glare of the headlights, I slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted it and the mirrors before he returned.