"And if the house burns down, yes." I shove the pillows up against the headboard. "We're safe here, as safe as can be." Which isn't saying much if the bombshell Andy dropped turns out to be true, but I'm not about to remind her of that. I lean back. "A wee dram?"

"Don't mind if I do. How about death by chocolate?"

"Sounds good to me."

For a minute we're silent; me filling two glasses, Mo working her way into the box of cocoa-dusted delights. Presently we exchange gifts. Outside, it's raining: the rattle and slap of water on glass merges with the distant noise of wheels on wet road surfaces, but inside our insulated, centrally heated bubble of suburbia we're isolated from the world.

"By the way, I haven't said thank you, have I?" she asks.

"What for?"

"Picking up the pieces, bollocking Andy for me, being a dear, that sort of thing. Just existing, when you get down to it."

"Um." I put my glass down. "Thank you. For saving my life this afternoon—"

"—but if you hadn't punched his legs out from under him he'd have shot me—"

"—he was going to shoot me first! Did you see where—"

We stop, looking at each other in mutual disbelief and incomprehension.

"How did we get here?" I ask her.

"I don't know." She frowns, then offers me the box of chocolates.

"Pick one."

I pick something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a hedgehog, except that it smells better. "Why?"

"Let's see . . . that one's unique in this collection, right? Let's consider life as a box of chocolates. All of them are unique. Let each chocolate be a, a significant event. All we can say of any chocolate before we eat it is that it was selected from the slowly diminishing set of chocolates we have not already encountered. But one thing they've all got in common is—"

"Theobroma cacao," I say, shoving it in my mouth and chewing. "Mmph."

"Yes. Now, let Theobroma cacao stand for the defining characteristics of our reality. We don't know precisely what the next chocolate will be, but we expect it to be brown and taste heavenly. But the previous chocolates we've eaten have narrowed the field of choice, and if, say, we've been picking the crunchy pralines selectively, we may find ourselves experiencing an unexpected run of soft centers—"

"I thought we were taking them at random?"

"No; we're picking them—without a menu card—but we can choose them on the basis of their appearance, are you with me? We can choose our inputs but not the outputs that result from them. And we have a diminishing array of options—"

"What kind of chocolate did you pick in Amsterdam?" I ask.