Perhaps she sees him still.

I look out of the window. Across this city of a million people. I have never felt more alone.

THINK.

I pick up my phone. Ring the next number on the list of hotels that the receptionist downstairs kindly printed out for me.

“Oh, yes, hello,” I say. “Do you speak English? Oh, good, great. Sorry? Yes, I’m hoping you can help me. The thing is, I would like to know if you have an Iris Armstrong staying there? No? How about an Iris Shepherd? Anyone called Vera? Terry? How about... Hello? Hello?”

I try the next number. And the next.

And then I hurl the phone against the wall, which has two immediate consequences.

1) The phone remains intact.

2) Dad wakes up.

“Is it morning time?” he asks, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

“It’s evening time,” I say.

“Oh,” he says.

I wonder what it’s like. Inside his head. His consultant told us he would explain it to us in as simple a language as he could manage, then paused for ages as if such a language were too simple for him to articulate. After some time, he stood up and drew a rudimentary—or simple, as he kindly phrased it—picture of a brain, riddled with knots that he identified as “plaques” and “tangles.” These “plaques” and “tangles,” he went on to explain, aided and abetted by a great deal of hand gestures, prevented signals from traveling from the brain—he pointed at his rudimentary drawing with the tip of an HB pencil—to other parts of our bodies. Here, he drew an imaginary circle on his chest, to further demonstrate.

Even Mam commented afterwards. On how patronizing he was.

Dad hung on his every word, none of which he remembered afterwards.

Now, he peers at me. “Do you work here?” he asks.

“No,” I say, without explaining as I usually would. Who I am. What we are doing here. Where we are going.

I have run out of answers. I don’t know anything.

Not a single thing.

I stand up, walk towards my smugly intact phone, pick it up off the floor.

It rings and I nearly drop it. It’s Brendan.

“Hello,” I say, unable to inject even a modicum of interest or enthusiasm into my voice. The stocks of such things are depleted.

“Terry? Are you okay?” Brendan’s voice is anxious and already I am sorry for not scraping the dregs of interest or enthusiasm from the bottom of my depleted store.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I say.

“You don’t seem fine. You seem...far away.” He sounds worried. Like he was during that period after my mother died. When I couldn’t seem to feel anything and everyone thought it was because of the tablets the doctor had prescribed except I wasn’t taking them even though I told everybody that I was because they were all so worried about me and it seemed like the least I could do.

“Where are you?” Brendan asks.