“Something like that.” The Schrödinger’s cat experiment extends to my feelings about the potential outcomes, too, and my feelings about those feelings . . . I simultaneously want the bones to be my father’s, because then he never voluntarily left me, and I hate myself for feeling that; and I don’t want them to be my father’s, because then he could still be alive and I hate myself for not knowing better than to cling on to such pitiful hope. “Though it does help actually being out of the Manse.” I can at least breathe again. I can sleep again.

“Your mother hated that house, you know.”

“I have some sympathy with that,” I say wryly, and I hear a breath of a grim chuckle from him. Though in truth, I couldn’t say that I hate it myself, not all of it. There are versions of it I could perhaps grow to love, if they could find a way to stay fixed. I hesitate to ask my next question. “She wasn’t . . . scared in it, was she?”

“I don’t think so. She just said that she could never sleep properly. Why, were you scared there when you were little?”

“I don’t think so.” I’ve tried to give it proper consideration. “I don’t have a lot of memories, but in the ones I have, I think I was . . . at home.” At home in the Manse. I’m surprised by a wave of longing. “But it’s certainly an odd place. Mercurial, I suppose.”

“Mercurial.” He sounds amused. “That’s a strange description for a house.”

“It’s a strange house. You should come and see it sometime.” It’s easy to imagine Pete in the Manse. I fancy there would be a sort of mutual respect between them. “Was it . . . was it just the house she hated, or was it everything here?”

He blows down the phone, thinking. “I don’t know, pet. She wasn’t much for talking about it. The past is another country and all that . . . But I don’t think she was very happy then. If your dad hadn’t disappeared, I doubt they would have lasted much longer.” He gives me space to say something, but he doesn’t press. I appreciate that about him. He’s always been happy to let me come to things at my own pace. When I don’t speak, he moves on. “So, no safe place.”

“What?”

“That’s the name of the painting you sent me a snap of. No Safe Place. Never my favorite piece.”