“If you like,” says the lawyer. “I imagine he’d like to meet you in any case.” Would he? I don’t have enough detail to flesh out a story. Or rather, I could create far too many from what I’ve got; there’s nothing to sway me in one particular direction over another. Glen McCue and my father knew each other, but were they acquaintances, or true friends? Was he, perhaps, closer to my mother? Or was it Glen’s wife that was the connection, and if so, to whom? These thoughts, and others, are bubbling up inside me, jostling to be heard. Were they always there, sealed tight in a lightless swampy corner deep among my entrails? “Well,” says Mr. MacKintyre, when I don’t speak. “I’ll get in touch with him directly in any case.”

“Thank you.” I disconnect with an overwhelming sense that it’s too late, the die has been cast. But it’s just a few questions, that’s all. It’s hardly monumentous.

I shake myself of the fancy and instead look around the second-floor landing. All doors are closed except the one to the family bathroom. As I watch, it moves gently in an undetectable breeze. I cross to it and close it with a firm hand, then push hard against it to test it. It holds fast. But by the time I get to the ground floor, it’s thudding again.

•   •   •

Later, Carrie calls from the train. I offer to come and get her from the station, and she protests, though her lack of conviction shouts above her actual words. We drive from the station in a near perfect rerun of the previous day, except it’s not dark as yet. The road is becoming more familiar to me, though I’m nowhere near ready to try it at the breakneck speed of that beaten-up Land Rover.

Carrie tentatively offers to make dinner, which I interpret as a peace offering to salve the flares of tension between us. I offer to help, of course, but she won’t have any of it, so I sit at the kitchen table while she preps, and before long it’s like our tense exchanges never happened. She has the radio on—of course—and the kitchen is warm from the oven and filled with the smell of the garlic bread that’s baking in there. We talk about her play, all the gossip among the cast. She’s funny, Carrie, in a very different way to, say, Ali. There’s barely any teeth in her humor, even when she’s sending up the pretensions of her theater luvvie colleagues, but it speaks volumes of her talent for quiet observation. The Manse feels different with her in it, too, I realize. There’s less thudding, for one thing. It feels more . . . what? More like a building—a house—should feel.