A few minutes slide by with the only sounds in the room being those of the ticking of a wall clock and the faint scraping of the nib of his pen.

“May I ask you a question about Kat?” I say.

“What about her?”

“Did she stop speaking straightaway after her mother died? I’m only asking because you are leaving tomorrow and she’ll be alone with me and I want to understand better how to care for her. I don’t want to do the wrong thing while you’re away.”

Martin caps the pen and sets it down on the table. I fear I’ve said too much, and all while he’d been trying to work. But when he opens his mouth to answer, his tone is calm.

“Candace was quite ill before she died,” he says. “The more her condition declined, the quieter Kat became, and she’d been a quiet child to begin with.”

“She must have loved her mother very much.” I watch Martin carefully to see if he will react in a way that will clue me in to his own level of grief. His beautiful face is unreadable.

“Yes.”

“And Candace’s parents? Were they of help to you with Kat during this terrible time?”

“No.”

He says the word effortlessly, as though it doesn’t pain him to say it. As though he’d not been surprised his in-laws hadn’t helped him and Kat walk that hard road since surely they were traveling it as well. “Whyever not?”

“We were not on friendly terms.”

“Why is that?”

He studies me for a moment, as though he is now watching me carefully, gauging how much he will tell me about the intricacies of his first marriage. “They’d planned for Candace to marry someone of substantial means—someone like them—and instead she married me. That was a disappointment to them.”

“But . . . but even so, surely they cared about their granddaughter?”

“Kat has never been an exceptionally sociable creature. Even before she stopped talking, she was a sober child who kept to herself. Her grandparents, the few times they saw her, found that behavior bizarre.”

“Are you saying they don’t have affection for their own grandchild?”

“Didn’t.”

“Didn’t?”

“Candace’s mother died of pneumonia last year. And I hear her father is not well.”

Poor Kat. Poor Martin. Poor dead Candace. My heart strangely aches for all three of them. How wounded Martin must be inside, and how hard it must be for him to pretend he isn’t.

As if he can read my thoughts, Martin gathers up the papers and the tablet and places them in a leather satchel resting at his feet. He closes it in a gesture that seems to bring the gavel down on the conversation. “Why don’t you rouse Kat and we’ll have breakfast?” He rises from the sofa with his satchel in hand and I follow him out of the room. He heads for the library next to the room we have just left. As I pass by the open door, I see him open a drawer in the doctor’s old desk and flip through some papers. He glances up, sees me, and waits for me to continue on up the stairs.