“Could this place be any more politically correct?” A voice I recognized. I turned. A bald man, dark-skinned and powerfully built, in T-shirt and carpenter’s trousers, carrying a large green toolbox in each hand. The immaculately shaved skin of his head, the unmistakable set of his jaw, his eyes so dark that I could not see where the iris ended and the pupil began.

“Jesus,” I said.

Tvist laughed. “It is good to see you too, Cal Curtis.”

“You have a kid here?”

“My little Josi. That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it? Fathers together. For the good of the children. Enforced bonding. This . . .” He looked about himself, laughing. “This is how we build our perfect little social-democratic world.” He handed me a toolbox. “Here is your electric drill.”

“Isn’t this about three conflicts of interest already?” I said.

He punched my arm gently. “I must not forget that you are a satirist. Now, to the diaper room.”

I stood there in the diaper room, with my drill and my bits, and Tvist stood there with his boxes of screws and nails and Rawlplugs and pencils. Around us men painted cupboards in primary colors. In the garden outside, other men swept leaves into green plastic sacks.

“So I’m wrong to think this would be a problem?” I said.

He smiled. “There is no conflict of interest. Precisely because this is for the children.”

There was an openness that I did not remember from the police station. In other circumstances, I thought, we could almost be friends. And yet . . .

And yet that Post-it note. How long had it sat on his desk? While on the island those men murdered four adults and eighty-seven teenagers?

“Nothing can be a problem,” he said, “when it is for the children.”

“All right.”

And so we worked quietly and efficiently, and I swallowed my feelings and concentrated on building shelves for my baby son’s diaper room. Tvist passed me screws and drill bits and Rawlplugs, made neat little marks on the painted walls with his 2B pencil; and for a time the awkwardness between us did disappear. Men at work. For the children.

Afterward we sat on the large wooden planters outside, drinking instant coffee and eating pink wafer biscuits. The older children stood in line for sausages in potato pancakes. Tvist offered me a cigarette, which I accepted.

“Can you imagine this place with an armed guard at the gate?” he said.

“No,” I said. “No, I really can’t.”