He was a large man, and driving big trucks and hauling heavy gear had given him broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. Too many transport café breakfasts and standing his round at the pub had put a tire around his waist. He had a square face and had dealt with a receding hairline by shaving his hair down to a brown fuzz. His eyes were blue and clever. Leslie had gotten her eyes from her dad.

Having four daughters meant that he had parental looming down to a fine art, and I fought the urge to ask whether Leslie could come out and play.

“Hello, Peter,” he said.

“Mr. May,” I said.

He made no effort to unblock the doorway; nor did he invite me in.

“Leslie will be out in a minute,” he said.

“She all right?” I asked. It was a stupid question and Leslie’s dad didn’t embarrass either of us by trying to answer it. I heard someone coming down the stairs and braced myself.

There’d been severe damage to the maxilla, nasal spine, ramus, and mandible, Dr. Walid had said. And although much of the underlying muscle and tendons had survived, the surgeons at UCH had been unable to save much of the skin surface. They’d put in a temporary scaffold to allow her to breathe and ingest food, and there was a chance that she might benefit from a partial face transplant—if they could find a suitable donor. Given that what was left of her jaw was currently held together by a filigree of hypoallergenic metal, talking was out of the question. Dr. Walid had said that once the bones were sufficiently fused, they might be able to restore enough functionality to the jaw to allow for speech. But it all sounded a bit conditional to me. Whatever you see, he’d said, take as long a look as you need to get used to it, to accept it, and then move on as if nothing has changed.

“Here she is,” said Leslie’s dad and turned sideways to allow a slim figure to squeeze past him. She wore a blue-and-white-striped hoodie with the hood up, drawstring pulled tight so that it hid her forehead and chin. The lower face was covered by a matching blue-and-white-patterned scarf and her eyes by a pair of unfashionably large sunglasses I suspected had been looted from her mum’s forgotten-clothes drawer. I stared but there was nothing to see.

“You should have said we were going out robbing,” I said. “I’d have brought a balaclava.”

She gave me a disgusted look—I recognized it from the tilt of her head and the way she held her shoulders. I felt a stutter in my chest and took a deep breath.

“Fancy a walk then?” I asked.

She nodded to her dad, took me firmly by the arm, and led me away from the house.