No customers, again, in the Achillion. The people walking past didn’t even slow down. Maybe there had been a council meeting about him. Maybe he was cursed. In a booth, Achilles flipped his worry beads over his wrist like a whip, and the amber clacked with a bright metallic sound. When would his daughters return? How does a person exit a family? Walk away and never speak to their kin again, he supposed. The years would go by. Then he’d fall mortally ill and Penny and Valia would visit him in his final days to bear witness, their hands over their eyes, and listen to his little voice say goodbye, and sorry—at last a final apology. They’d forgive him, he imagined, because everything ends, including anger and hatred and revenge. At last they’d love him again. But to be loved at the precipice of death! Not a reunion a father could look forward to.

For the first time in the history of the Cafe Achillion, he wrote a note to hang in the window: Back soon in 10 minutes flat. It injured him to close the shop. But what else could he do? If he stayed in the cafe he might start thinking he was the last person in Bardwell Park; he’d go mad. Achilles put the takings from the previous month into a bag and rushed down to the bank in a grey cardigan and an apron. And by God there it was, his curse animal, on a poster advertising the Los Dios Circus: an illustration featuring a conceited monkey in a bandleader costume and an elephant, in the background, wearing a crown. Achilles put up his hands to block out the image. Without setting foot inside the bank, he turned around and went back to the cafe. If something bad should happen today, he asked God, don’t make me wait! Achilles locked the doors, sat down in the booth and didn’t get up—didn’t dare do another thing on this unlucky day—until about 5 pm, when someone knocked on the closed cafe doors and peered inside, into the immaterial gloom of the unlit cafe. It was Lucky, or one of the Furies in the disguise of a son-in-law.

Achilles unlatched the door and said: ‘What do you want? You want money, is that it? You want to attack me?’

‘I need to pick up a few of our things.’

‘Today is not a good time. Come back again and bring Valia,’ Achilles said, shutting the door on his son-in-law.