He walked across the room toward me and we stood close, our fingers touching. I heard Henry’s voice again, two floors below. I heard Mum. There was something in their voices, something coiled and tense, and I pictured it, that drama, waiting for us on the other side of the door like a primed cat, about to pounce.

“This doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“It’s okay,” Novo said. “We will fix it. And I’ll be here.”

“You promise?”

“On my life,” Novo said. “On my life, I swear to you. I’m not going anywhere.”

TWENTY

We came down the steps from the attic quietly, barefoot and half-dressed. Our tread on the stairs was light as anything, almost soundless. We were hardly there. Henry’s windows were wide open, curtains flailing in the wind, and Charlie Parker was all panic-panic, hell-for-leather, in a high, far corner of the room. I heard voices again downstairs, fraught and urgent, and in my head something started ticking, a chattering feeling, like crickets, a percussive, nervous pulse. I stopped at the top of the next flight.

“I’m not liking this,” I said. “I don’t want to go down there at all.”

Novo took my hand and pulled at me gently. “It’s all right,” he said. “We have to. Come on.”

We got closer and I heard a chair scrape and then Mum said something in a strangled, underwater voice that wasn’t hers, and I said, “Is she crying? Is that even her?”

My mum doesn’t cry. She sulks and quits eating and chain-smokes in the garden and breaks cups. But she’s not a crier. This had to be something bad. Something big. And knowing that threw me. It really did.

We stopped outside the kitchen. “What friend?” Mum was saying to Henry in her saltwater voice. “Jude hasn’t got any friends, Henry. We just got here.”

I put my eye to the crack in the door. Mum was wiping her face with both hands, bleary-eyed and frantic with distress.

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said, and even though Henry made all the right noises of dissent, she put her hands on her heart. “Something terrible has happened to my child. I can feel it in here. Jude’s gone. I just know it.”

“Mum,” I said. “I’m right here!” and I pushed on the door, ready to reassure her. But the door didn’t move, and Mum didn’t hear me.

I looked at Novo. “What’s going on? What’s happened to me?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, Jude. Look. You’re here.”

“But Mum thinks I’m not there,” I told him. “What happened? Why can’t she hear me?”