“I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi was saying. “This was during the period when they weren’t building new ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fund-raising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. Emphasis on the dress, little and slinky and black. I was supposed to be seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. I did a good enough job that they sent me over to meet a consortium of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one dude, Liam.

“Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this old family, lots of money and not a lot of supervision and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs, too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. She ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby. That was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and tried to make things good with her brother. Are you with me so far?”

“So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story,” Portia said.