The house was dead quiet and we filled it with sound. Our steps on the floorboards, the creak of us on the stairs. Novo breathing, a seashell sound, in and out, soft and constant. I could hear Henry’s ticking clocks. His door was wide open for a change, bright sunlight streaming onto the landing in strong, straight lines like someone had marked it there with a ruler.

He was feeding the gulls. Three of them clashed and wheeled outside his window—wild and powerful that close up, their wide wingspan, their sharp, watchful heads.

“Henry?” Novo said.

He didn’t turn round. “Come in, both of you. Come in.”

Charlie Parker tried to fly through the walls when we went in there, went at it like a fly at a window, wings hammering away.

“It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s okay, Charlie. Calm down.”

I looked at Novo. I asked him, without speaking, what that was about, and without speaking, he said he didn’t know. We watched as Charlie Parker panicked and Henry made clicking noises and held a thin strip of fish out the window. One of the birds angled sharply in the glare and snatched it out of his hand with its precise beak. The pins on the big map of the world glinted in the bright light.

“Don’t be scared of him, Jude,” Henry said. “He won’t hurt you.” And I couldn’t say then, in that moment, if he meant the feeding bird or Novo.

“I’m not scared. I’m not scared of him at all.”

“I’ve known these gulls since they were young,” Henry said. “I knew their parents and their grandparents. Every year they come and visit. I can tell by their markings. The red spot on this one’s beak. That one’s mottled wing. They are seven or eight now. Did you know that seagulls can live to be fifteen?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“It’s in their nature to come back,” Henry said. “Even a caged bird turns like a compass when the time comes. And it’s in my nature to stay here and wait.”

Novo still hadn’t spoken. He was watching Henry so carefully, with so much focus, same as the seagulls at the window. They cut and hovered at a distance, responding to his every move, the exact same height in the sky as his bony, outstretched arm. They cut and hovered, and Novo watched, and it seemed like nothing else in the world was happening that was more important than that.