“Tough. We don’t have any money left. We’re going to look at the sea.”

Last time they were on a boat was with Max, Vanessa, Souad, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. Back when Morgan had a mother, and Vanessa had a decent boyfriend. Back before everything in their world got broken.

Book Three

Chapter 1

Do you ever feel as if you’re living a life that’s not yours?

This is the question that’s been pounding through Gillem’s head since Celia Bonnet first contacted him.

He drifts downstairs at three, four a.m.—sleep now seems a fad he outgrew years ago—and looks around his own kitchen with the eyes of an intruder. At the refrigerator, whose front is tacked with brightly colored alphabet magnets displaying emergency contact numbers (Kate’s mobile, Gillem’s mobile, Kate’s office, pediatrician, Kate’s sister, police, fire, hospital), notices from Artemio’s school, drawings of robots and war machines that Artemio made years ago.

He sits down on a stool at the kitchen counter, and wonders, Why do we have those age-yellowed drawings and preschool alphabets tacked to our refrigerator? Why do we sit on high stools, like dunces?

And he knows the answer. Because everybody does. If you have stools in a kitchen around a countertop, then your children will perch on them, chattering to you while you cook, and then you will be a happy family.

Because if you don’t have emergency medical numbers and the dates of your child’s school play tacked to the refrigerator, then it means you don’t care whether or not he chokes to death from a bee sting, or if nobody shows up to his Peter Pan, and if you don’t mount his drawings in that actually quite derogatory space—how would he, Gillem, feel if his own artwork were affixed to the refrigerator?—then he will think you don’t value him.

They do these things to be like everybody else. They do it as more traditional peoples hang amulets of upraised palms and blue glass eyes over the baby’s cradle, to avert destruction. In next-generational overcompensation, because in neither his nor Kate’s childhood was there ever a mother in the kitchen cooking supper, or a father who knew whether or not you’d learned to read.

They do it in a show of legitimacy. This is how we enshrine our modern trinity: wage-earning Mummy, chores-performing Daddy, high-achieving Child. If you don’t do this, it’s helter-skelter. The floods will engulf you, and everybody will revert to savagery. You will father strange children off strange women, bastards who grow up and who eventually come to find you in order to—to what? To cut your throat? Or simply to confront you with the howling futility of your life, the utter fraudulence of everything you’ve made and said you stood for.

Why has she come?