“You must miss her.”

“You get used to things.”

I look at Iris. “I’ll be back in a tick,” I say.

I walk down the corridor that doesn’t seem as shadowy now that I know where Coco Chanel is. Or where she isn’t, I should say.

“Dad?” I call through the bathroom door, but there is no answer. I push the door open and look inside, but the room is empty. The toilet has a flush chain that would be quaint were it not for the rust. The mirror over the mustard-yellow sink is spattered with black spots. There is a way to remove these but I cannot for the life of me recall it. The door at the end of the corridor leads into Vera’s bedroom. It resembles Kate’s bedroom before Kate moved to Galway. Crumpled clothes pitched on the floor and piled on a chair, and a dressing table besieged with lotions and potions and makeup brushes and palettes of eyeshadows and bottles of nail varnish standing in long lines, like they are waiting their turn.

In the center of the room, an enormous double bed, and in the center of the bed is my father, fully dressed and fast asleep.

This is not good for many reasons. The first one that comes to mind is his nighttime tablet. I haven’t given it to him. I don’t have it. All his medication is in the Airbnb. I don’t know what the tablet does. Or what it prevents. I move towards the bed, picking clothes off the floor as I go. Folding them. Setting them in a neat pile on the chair. Occupational hazard, I suppose.

“Dad?” I sit on the edge of the bed, poke my finger against the hard plate of his chest. There’s not a pick on him.

He doesn’t stir. He is laid out on his back, stiff and still. He could be dead.

Dead in Vera’s bed.

I’ll have to explain to the authorities how we came to be here. Where we’ve been. Where we’re going. I’ll probably be arrested and I won’t be able to organize the repatriation of Dad’s body home, and even if I can, the cost will be exorbitant and I haven’t taken out travel insurance and I’m positive there’s not enough money in my running away from home account to cover it, and even if there was, the fact would remain that he’s dead and that it’s all my fault because I shouldn’t have brought him with me. I shouldn’t have come in the first place.

Dad grunts and shifts and I jump, clipping my ankle off the leg of the bed and it smarts and I welcome the pain because it’s so much better than the alternative.

Now I see the rise and fall of his chest. He sleeps on his back with his hands tucked behind his head, as if he is sunbathing on a grassy bank. Without the anxiety and fearfulness that patrol his face by day, he looks like himself. The before version.