‘Well I’m sure it wasn’t me, in the photo,’ I say (perhaps hoping thereby to provoke him into fetching the damn thing after all).

‘No,’ Mr Huff concedes. He picks up his knitting. He knits. I watch the needles sliding up against each other and then being pulled apart. I see the yarn tying them together and then slipping off and releasing them once more with a typically dispassionate woollen shrug.

What is it with these photographs, anyway? I wonder. How to account for my complete lack of … of any desire to …? This feeling … What is it? Not indifference. Almost a … a coldness … A grim chilliness. An icy resistance. But what exactly am I resisting? Is it the idea of seeing something that can’t then be unseen? Clues? Evidence? As if by my seeing those photographs – just the act of … – as if by my seeing them – him, her, them, me – it might all suddenly become too real again? Might I find myself engulfed again? Becalmed? Overwhelmed? Helpless? Scorched? Or – worse still – having to … to … reassess …?

What if I find myself marginalized in those photos? What if I finally have to accept – to realize – that I’m not actually … That I was always stuck on the outside – in the outskirts – that I was really just … just incidental, even though I sometimes felt as if this – here, then – was the only time I truly … The only time I truly worked? Truly meshed?

What an awful prospect.

To be rendered so … so unnecessary. And to finally be completely and utterly assured of that fact. To see it. Right there. Once and for all. In black and white.

I stare at the needles again, depressed.

Mr Huff has such graceful hands; lean yet still quite … quite manly hands. And as I watch them work away, mechanically, something odd suddenly dawns on me … It’s like … It’s almost as if … yes … as if Orla was the wool. Orla was the wool, the yarn, and Bran and Kalinda were the needles and I was the … Me. I was the thing that they knitted. I was the thing that they made. Before everything just … just imploded, exploded, faded. I was the thing that they made. I am what remains – their creation – the little garment they wove … And maybe … maybe I’m not the most useful or important or significant of garments (a lone baby’s mitten, one half of a tank-top) but I’m their garment … And maybe (I stare at Mr Huff), maybe he was their garment, too – poor, old Mr Huff, stuck a million miles away in Mexico, wifeless – almost by default.

So if that’s the case, then why not just …?

What?!

Why not …? No. No. It’s too complicated. Too dangerous. Just to … to care. Just to open yourself up again to all that terrible light and savage bliss and deafening reverberation.