When I get back to the Manse after dropping Carrie off, I climb on a kitchen chair and reach up to rotate the smoke alarm cover. It slides and releases just as I remember it, but without the same angry buzzing. In fact, the interior is suspiciously clean, and there’s an empty space where the nine-volt battery should be. I have a quick hunt through the kitchen drawers for any spare nine-volt batteries, but to no avail, so I climb back onto the chair. When the cover is once again fitted into place, I can no longer avoid thinking about the implications.

Either someone was in the house and removed the evidence of the fly incident at some point between 3:30 A.M. and 8:30 A.M., or Carrie is right and I’m delusional. I’m not sure which is worse. In any case, I start with the ground floor, moving systematically through the entire house, checking every possible access point—which as a course of action, I think with grim humor, has the benefit of fitting neatly into either hypothesis—and simultaneously sweeping for any more overlooked ashtrays. But at the end of my search, I haven’t found any ashtrays or any obvious entry points. I remind myself that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Though who would go to the trouble of breaking in purely to move things around, and why? The newspaper-deliverer? But this is an extraordinarily subtle form of intimidation. It doesn’t seem to fit with the naked vitriol of those angry red pen circles.

But it must have been someone, because I couldn’t have dreamed the flies. I couldn’t have.

My father is a ski instructor in a resort in Canada. In the summer he’s a rafting guide. He has a girlfriend called Crystal who teaches yoga and believes deeply that the only way to save the planet is through vegetarianism, which is a philosophy that, except for the odd bacon sandwich, he largely buys into. He never talks about his life before, and he barely even thinks about it. It’s like he was a different person; it’s like he was born anew on the night he decided to leave. Sometimes he’s confronted by artwork produced by his ex-wife—that’s how he thinks of her, as his ex-wife—and he congratulates himself on being able to be pleased for her success, in an objective, unemotional sort of way. He doesn’t think of his daughter at all, not since he concluded that she was never actually his.

ELEVEN