“I don’t know . . . that it was a strange house. She couldn’t sleep properly in it. She said she first started painting in that house—here, I suppose—because she couldn’t sleep.” She looks at the inscription again. “A furnace of the soul,” she murmurs dreamily. “That’s the kind of love I’d like.” She cocks her head as she looks at me, a wicked gleam in her eye. “Does Jonathan make a furnace of your soul?”

“No, thank God! It doesn’t sound terribly . . . sustainable.”

“Sustainable! Aren’t you the die-hard romantic!” Carrie is laughing at me, as I meant her to, but I’m not being entirely flippant. A furnace surely can’t last. It makes me think of the newsroom phrase: burned out. Like the oil rig, like the missing kirk, until all that is left is a blackened husk of the original, all energy and passion and ability to care vaporized by the infernal fire. “Seriously, though, did you never just meet someone and know? Who they were inside and that you were right for each other? Someone you’d trust to be on your side come what may?” Is she talking about something current, or in the past? I wonder. There’s something around her eyes . . . I can’t tell if she’s wishing or remembering.

“I kind of like to know the whole story first.”

Carrie shakes her head, amused. “Nobody ever knows the whole story. Not even the people in it.” She looks at the inscription again, and I see a distorted reflection of her dreamy smile in the old, uneven glass of the window. I get up to close the curtains before darkness can take its hold. “This house,” she says, shaking her head. “Everybody I meet round here is always talking about it. Like they can’t leave it alone.”

Like picking a scab, I think. “Well, hopefully that will translate into offers when I put it on the market.”

“Do you have any idea of what it’s worth yet?”

“I spoke to a couple of agents again today. They both said roughly the same price”—I name a figure that widens her eyes—“but it depends very much on the market. It’s such a specific property. It could get zero interest or it could end up in a bidding war.”

“Well, for that kind of money, I can see how it might stick in Ali’s throat.”

I shake my head. “Ali’s? Why Ali’s throat?”

“Well, because . . .” She sees my blank look. “Shit, I thought you knew.” She takes a deep breath. “He’s Ali Jamieson. His family owned the jewelers.”