“You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother were into collecting art. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the transatlantic exchange, the post-colonial relationship between England and the U.S., something like that. And what he did was he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the original London Bridge. This artist bought the suburban ranch house, circa 2000, and the furniture in it and everything else, down to the rolls of toilet paper and the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs and video so he would know exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to England, where he built it all again on Liam’s family’s estate. And, simultaneously, he had a second house built right beside it. This second house was an exact replica, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to the cans of soup on the shelves in the kitchen.”

“Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

“Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on shoes and booze and vacations for me and all of my friends.”

“Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank.

“This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

“Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

“Anyway, this double installation won some award. Got lots of attention. The whole point was that nobody knew which house was which. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother, the black sheep, came home. And her brother said to her, ‘I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation.’ Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

“This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

“Liam’s mother went away and talked to God about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

“How did she decide which house to live in?” Sullivan said.