Another battle not worth fighting.

He spent ten minutes turning his kitchen upside down looking for the key Everett had given him way back when, only to remember it was in the top drawer of the desk. Grant sighed, went in and found it, then grabbed his bag and coat.

The things we do for family.

He locked up the Maida Vale house, found a cab, and headed up the hill to his brother’s house in Hampstead.

Frankel put the movie on pause and rubbed his eyes.

The film certainly took its time to get going. He was already an hour in and nothing had happened. Wasn’t it supposed to be about the Civil War? Where were all the battle scenes? What about all those bodies laid out for as far as the eye could see in the picture on the back of the DVD?

Instead, there were all these scenes with Scarlett pining after Ashley Wilkes, the man her cousin Melanie was going to marry. Some epic alright. It was giving him an epic headache. He dug into his bag for some Tylenol and washed them down with the water, then looked over to see the twin girl staring at him.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Nah. Just have a bit of a headache.”

“If you were, my mummy would make me wear a mask—and I hate wearing masks.”

“You’re good.” He nodded at the book in her lap. “What’ve you got there?”

“My puzzles.”

He saw she was using a red pen to draw lines between a series of dots that turned into various animals. “Connect the Dots. I used to do those when I was your age. Is that your favorite?”

“I like the hidden ones better,” she told him.

“Hidden ones?”

She found a black and white drawing of an English country garden. At the top of the page were the words Hidden Figures and Numbers .

“See how it looks like a garden? It’s really filled with letters and numbers.” Her eyes suddenly widened. “See, here’s a K!”

Sure enough, embedded in the whorls of the tree bark was the letter K . The girl circled it in red with glee.

“And I think that’s an upside down seven right beside it,” Frankel pointed out.

“It is!” She circled that one as well. “You’re pretty good at this.”

“Beginner’s luck.”

The two of them hunted for digits and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Most were easy to find, especially the numbers, but Frankel held back and let the little girl (whose name was Claire and her brother, whose eyes never left his video game, was Jack) locate the majority, giving her a hint every now and then.

A few of the letters—the T and X in particular—proved more difficult.

“That’s because it’s easy for them to look like something else,” said Claire.