He padded to the bed and studied her, as though her physical form were a kind of clue: a warm, shadowy hieroglyphic. She lay now on her left side, her right arm trailing over the edge of the bed, where Rosa, the impossibly good-tempered maid from Chihuahua, had lined up the child’s shoes, quaintly, according to season. He paused, looked from the girl to the shoes, then crouched down, his knees ratcheting from old cartilage problems acquired after years of pounding and twisting on the courts. He ignored the summer sandals and started with her trainers, then her school shoes, then the glossy red boots that he called wellingtons and Kirsty called galoshes. Last of all were the winter booties lined with lamb’s-wool which Alice, her thoughts full of English winters, had sent for Ella’s sixth birthday, but which she would have outgrown by the fall. He upended them, shook them out, then burrowed his fingers into the wool. In the pointed toe of the left boot he touched something smooth about the size of a Deroxat capsule, and with his fingertips working like pincers he disentangled it from the fleece and held it up, squinting at it against the orange glow of the window, though he knew already it was the missing ear stud, one of the pair Kirsty had left unattended for an hour on the ledge of the bathroom sink.

It meant, of course, there would have to be another talk, one of those gently reproachful interviews of which there had been so many since the first ring had gone missing eighteen months ago; Ella perched on a chair, her feet swinging over the carpet, just the faintest hint of insolence in her eyes, as if her parents’ failure to comprehend the secret purpose of the game excited in her a childish contempt. Hoffmann, $150 an hour, had cautioned Larry and Kirsty not to make these discussions in any way traumatic. ‘It’s a delicate matter,’ he had warned them, smiling from the far side of an expanse of burnished desk, ‘like pruning bonsai,’ and he had gestured to his collection of tiny mutant willows that clearly thrived in the dimmed and filtered air of his office.