“Indeed.” Ignoring my caustic tone, he paused to remove his glasses and rub the bridge of his nose, then went on diffidently. “I don’t suppose that you’ve had some slight contact with your father over the years?” His small myopic eyes blinked hopefully from his round face, putting me in mind of a mole. He must have been at least fifty, and he looked so much like how I would have imagined a probate lawyer would look that I could have believed I was on a film set and none of this was real. “A birthday card or something . . . anything . . . that you might not have wanted to share with your mother?”

I shook my head mutely.

“Ah,” he said sadly. “That is a shame.” I stared at him, but he was rubbing the bridge of his nose again. The gross absurdity of his understatement appeared lost on him. “Then the avenue that is open to you is to apply to the courts to rectify the situation; that is to say, to have his ownership share transferred to yourself. It would be under the Scottish Courts; you’d have to apply for a Presumption of Death. Our Edinburgh office would help you with that, though.” Presumption of Death. I found myself imagining a form with those words in crisp black ink on stark white paper. How neat and tidy and definitive for a situation that was nothing of the sort. He went on, adopting an apologetic tone again: “I have to say that given the precise details of your father’s disappearance, I imagine it might not be a straightforward process. It could take quite some months. Years even.”

“Right,” I said faintly while the Manse in my memory grew, expanding out from the photograph, hijacking my thoughts, my mind, my life. A house I hadn’t lived in since my father disappeared and we fled from his absence—at least my mother fled, and I was dragged along, repeatedly bleating, But, Mummy, when he comes back, how will he know where we’ve gone? The lawyer looked at me sympathetically as I took a sip from the glass of water that had been thoughtfully placed in front of me, next to the square box of tissues. This lawyer was nothing if not prepared, though I doubted he had seen a situation quite like this before. “So what you’re saying is that I own fifty percent of a property on which I have to pay one hundred percent of the maintenance bills, but there’s nothing I can do with it?”

He placed the glasses back on his nose. “Nothing, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Unless you want to live in it, of course.”

I didn’t. I don’t. Yet here I am. Temporarily.

•   •   •