Lydia and Grace moved back into their home adjacent to the gallery; Alex and Christine and Isobel came to keep them company, at least for these first nights. Alex and Christine took the big front bedroom because Lydia said she wasn’t ready to sleep in there, not yet. Isobel put a mattress on the floor beside the bed where Grace slept naked on her front, with her arm hanging down, hand curled as if she was half-holding something. Isobel slipped her own fingers inside her friend’s, found nothing there. She didn’t know if Grace could feel her, in her sleep; perhaps her hand tightened on Isobel’s – but that might have only been a spasm of the thrumming, manic, overheated engine Isobel could feel driving Grace along, never letting up its effort onwards into this grief. At least she had let go the idea of the death mask. Now instead she was obsessing about photographing her father in his coffin. She’d made up her mind that the picture itself must represent the emotional difficulty of its taking, and she was working with a family friend, a photographer who used the wet-plate collodion process. He would prepare the glass plates for her and make a temporary darkroom in the gallery, because they must be processed immediately. Grace spent hours researching, calling Isobel over to her laptop to admire the mournful old photographs with their depth of light and hair-fine detail, mossy darkness eating away at their edges.