Thierry had his favorites and his antifavorites. Rat, he soon concluded, was a spoiled brat with all her mother’s failings and none of her strong points, and Jérôme he had a peculiar sort of grudge against, but Morgan he thought was the sort of boy he himself had been: a clever sensitive kid crying out for a man’s care. There was something odd about the way he always took Morgan’s side against the women, even when there was no fight to pick.

One harrowing period, Thierry got it into his head that Morgan was dyslexic, presumably because he himself had been, and that no one was attending to his problem. In the evenings, he tried to make Morgan read aloud and do special exercises. When Morgan’s teacher complained that he was coming to school dead-exhausted and that anyway he could read just fine, Thierry threatened to yank Morgan out of the system and homeschool him.

Vanessa had been obliged to get Thierry to back off and leave Morgan’s education alone.

Later on, Rat could look back and see how Thierry had disintegrated over the years he lived with them: how all his initial domestic enthusiasms, his projects to make himself a workshop in the shed, or to keep hens so they could have fresh eggs, or even to sublet the apartment so they could all go live in Guadeloupe, had fizzled out, giving way to a corrosive apathy.

One day, he pulled a muscle in his back helping Vanessa move a dresser, and from then on, he barely left the house. When Rat and Morgan got back from school in the afternoons, Thierry would still be asleep in bed, or maybe sitting on the front stoop in an old kimono of Vanessa’s, smoking a joint and drinking pastis.

Rat and Morgan tried not to talk too much about Thierry when they were on their own, because they were stuck with him and it would only make it worse, but when he was drinking, they tended to stay over at the Cabreras’.

One time, when Thierry didn’t know Rat was home, she overheard him pestering Morgan in a way that seriously spooked her.

He’d found a tick in Vesuvio’s fur, and he wanted Morgan to hold the dog still while he extracted it with the tweezers. But Morgan was completely phobic about Vesuvio, and rightly so. Every time he tried to hold Vesuvio’s collar, the dog would crane round and try to bite him, and Thierry would curse at him for letting go.

“Why are you so scared of Vesuvio, my darling?” Thierry asked, now in his softest, most cajoling voice. “Vesuvio wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know that, don’t you? You’re too big to be scared of dogs. You’re a big boy now, Momo. You know that, don’t you?”

Morgan said nothing.