What would Mollie say? He conjures her up and tells her, again, I’m sorry about your daughter. I wasn’t a good uncle. I had my own children, but that wasn’t an excuse. I just didn’t— And Mollie smiles, kind as ever, and takes his hand. You can’t change that now, she says, we all wish we’d done things differently. Not quite absolution, but better than nothing. He holds onto Mollie, and thinks: you didn’t live long enough for me to let you down.

Janet has left a little Gideon Bible by his bedside, and he leafs through it nervously. He can’t remember when he stopped going to church, only that it wasn’t a conscious decision, he was just too busy, too tired, and how could any of this be God’s plan? So he let his parents bring the kids to Sunday school, which he now regrets whenever the proselytising portion of Janet’s visits comes round. It would be simpler if he believed, and more comforting—although what if she’s right, and beyond the curtain is not the void he fears, but all the dead, not as friendly as in his memory, but ready with an accounting of all he owes them?

He shuts his eyes. It was so simple, to do nothing but lose himself in work each day, then the newspapers and TV afterwards. His children learnt not to speak to him if he was reading, and never to enter his bedroom. He put food on the table (mostly packets from the hawker centre, picked up on his way back) and paid for their schooling. That was as far as duty went. Should he have done more? And Siew Li. He could have done something to save her, couldn’t he? He never tried. Those letters—he tries to remember now where he left them. He should say something to… The thought is tiring, and skitters out of reach.

He struggles to find a happier memory. The jubilation when Siew Li was released, that’s always good. Watching her re-enter the world, taking her place in it again. Being with her, properly, without a table between them—it felt special now, like they had to treasure it because they’d waited so long. “Were you about to give up?” she asked him once. “Or would you have waited forever?” And of course he said forever, but it was impossible to know. He introduced her to his parents, afraid they would say something about her background or her imprisonment, prepared to defend her.

Jason had always been one of those people with a plan—initially marked out for him by ambitious parents (the right schools, the right clubs), and later the well-defined path of the civil service. Siew Li was an aberration, but at the time it felt exhilarating, to be with people trying to change something outside of themselves. Mollie was standoffish at first. Then perhaps inevitably, they became friends. Siew Li took to coming earlier than announced, so by the time Jason emerged from his room, they were comfortably ensconced on the sofa, chattering away slightly too fast for him to follow. Siew Li assured him that she hadn’t said one word about her ideology, not to worry, and Mollie claimed to be talking only about clothes and music, nothing embarrassing.