‘I watched you that first day you came, Alice Coleman, looking out over the mountains, shading your eyes from the sun and you stood so still and you stared so intently – as though you wanted to take something from this place back home with you, only you couldn’t work out what, and I think you must have cast some kind of spell on me, because all those months I kept thinking about you until one day there you were, standing at the foot of my ladder, so angry, so haughty.’

‘I was not.’

‘Then sitting at the kitchen table, your plans spread everywhere, all those terrible building manuals you were trying to keep one step ahead with.’

‘You were outrageously patronizing.’

He kisses my hair. ‘That day Winfred carried you unconscious into the schoolroom, your leg spouting blood like a Texas oil strike – and he put you in my arms and I said your name and you opened your eyes and replied “bastard” before promptly passing out again.’

‘Certainly did not.’

He chuckles. ‘Yes you did and I knew then you were mine.’

‘I nearly turned you in.’

‘Well thanks to you and Benjamín, it seems I’m out of a day job anyway.’

I fall silent. ‘What will happen to Dolores?’

‘They’ll put her on a bus. Send her back home. I can try to help her there.’

‘And then? What will you do?’

‘Ah you know,’ he says lightly, ‘retire. Open a little espresso bar in Ague, or perhaps an arts and crafts shop.’

‘Never.’

‘No never, of course never.’ He kisses me. ‘Maybe I’ll go home . . .’

‘You have a home? I thought you were a hobo.’

‘A ranch in New Mexico. My father left it to me when he died. It’s near the Rio Grande. In the fall, Arctic geese and Sandhill cranes come to roost in the marshes and stay through the winter. I think you’d like it.’

I touch my fingers to the creases in his jaw. How would it feel, I wonder – to be able to have something you’ve wanted so badly and for so long, to answer a desire that you’ve hidden away in the deepest part of yourself .. . ‘I have to go home, Duval.’

‘I know,’ he says simply, ‘I’ve always known.’

I turn away. I don’t want him to see me cry.

‘There’s a window at the top of the house faces north’, he says, eventually. You can see for miles. When I was a boy I used to watch for my father out of that window.’ He turns my face back to him and smooths the hair out of my eyes. ‘Now, perhaps, I will watch for you.’